A method of generating a facial animation sequence comprising the steps of: a) observing a real facial image sequence - the original image sequence - and capturing the information generated thereby; b) aligning another facial image - the end image - in an appropriate manner co-ordinate-wise with the original one; c) analysing the information from the original image sequence mathematically; and d) using the results so obtained to drive the movements which generate the end image sequence. Principal components analysis is applied to successive frames from the original image sequence to generate the necessary co-ordinate frames characterising an individual's permissible facial actions and the resulting new sequence is then projected into the thus-defined co-ordinate frames to drive the end image accordingly. Alternatively the necessary vectorisations are generated by non-PCA-based analytical tecniques in which the analysis proceeds from vectorial bases.
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