Three-dimensional mesh warping for natural eye-to-eye contact in Internet video communication

A camera used in video communication over Internet is usually placed on top of a monitor, therefore it is hard for an user to make a natural eye contact with the peer communicator since the user gazes at the monitor, not the camera lens. In this paper, we propose a simple 3D mesh warping technique for gaze-correction. It performs 3D rotation of face image by a certain correction angle to obtain a gaze-corrected image. The correction angle is estimated in an unsupervised way by using invariant face feature, and a very simple face section model is used in 3D rotation instead of precise, but not easily attainable in most cases, 3-D face models. The method is computationally simple enough to implement for real-time casual video communication applications.