PROCESSING OF FACIAL INFORMATION BY COMPUTER

Faces are very familiar to everyone and convey various information, in cluding information that is specific to the individual and information that is part of mutual communication. Usually verbal media is not abl e to describe such information appropriately. Recently, detailed studi es on facial information processing by computer have been carried out in the engineering field for application to communication media and hu man interfaces. Two main topics are recognition of human faces and syn thesis of facial images. The objective of the former is to enable comp uters to recognize human faces and that of the latter is to provide a natural and impressive interface in the form of a ''face'' for communi cation media. These technologies have also been found to be useful in various fields related to the face, such as psychology, anthropology, cosmetology, and dentistry. Although most of the studies in these fiel ds have been carried out independently, the above technologies provide for a common study tool among them. This paper focuses on processing facial information by computer. First, recent research trends on the s ynthesis of facial images and recognition of facial expressions are ou tlined. After considering the various characteristics of the face, the engineering applications of facial information are discussed from two standpoints: the support of face-to-face communication between humans , and communication between human and machine using facial information . The tools and databases used in studying facial information processi ng and some related topics are also described. (C) 1998 Scripta Techni ca, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 81(10): 36-57, 1998.