: Left: This facial model has 348 MB of uncompressed blendshape data, and runs at 8 frames per second on 8 CPUs. Our compression method reduces the storage to 25.4 MB and achieves 300 frames per second with a GPU implementation. No artifacts are visible. Right: The user can interactively manipulate the blendshape puppet by dragging any vertex on the model. The deforming region is colored red for visual feedback. We present a method to compress complex blendshape models and thereby enable interactive, hardware-accelerated animation of these models. Facial blendshape models in production are typically large in terms of both the resolution of the model and the number of target shapes. They are represented by a single huge blendshape matrix, whose size presents a storage burden and prevents real-time processing. To address this problem, we present a new matrix compression scheme based on a hierarchically semi-separable (HSS) representation with matrix block reordering. The compressed data are also suitable for parallel processing. An efficient GPU implementation provides very fast feedback of the resulting animation. Compared with the original data, our technique leads to a huge improvement in both storage and processing efficiency without incurring any visual artifacts. As an application, we introduce an extended version of the direct manipulation method to control a large number of facial blendshapes efficiently and intuitively.
REF improved the regularization term of the inverse problem, and offered a new matrix compression scheme for complex models based on hierarchically semi-separable representations with an interactive GPU-based animation.
Compression and Direct Manipulation of Complex Blendshape Models