Chapter 1: Introduction

Human faces are among the most important subjects of image processing, computer vision and graphics. Facial visual signal processing has been one of the top important research topics in the computer vision community. Research on face signal analysis and synthesis spans a broad range of modalities and methodologies including static frames and dynamic sequences of color images, depth images and LIDAR data. The applications of facial visual signal processing are also widespread including image enhancement, compression, recognition and animation. Recently, with the breakthroughs of computing infrastructure and social computing platforms, facial visual signal processing techniques are having tremendous opportunities in contributing to virtual reality, social network and remote sensing applications. The combination of facial processing techniques in graphics — such as face animation, and vision — such as expression recognition enables the unprecedented opportunity for remote and virtual interactive services…