Create Your Favourite Actor From Nothing But Photos

mikejuk writes: If you always wanted to see John Wayne play the lead in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you might not have to wait much longer. A University of Washington team has essentially reversed engineered what makes an actor recognizable as that actor, or as the title of the paper puts it "What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks".
  https://homes.cs.washington.ed...
  It explains how using nothing but photos and videos from the web it is possible to create an actor puppet that follows the expressions of a driver i.e. a puppeteer. Now your really can see actors perform things they never got round to performing.
The model of the "puppet"is first created using photos.from the web. The next stage is to analyse a video of the "driver", i.e. to work out the deformations in the puppet needed to make it follow the driver.
The real innovation is working out how to convert the movement of one person into those of the actor so that the actor remains recognizable. You might think that its would be complicated because everyone smiles in a different way and Tom Hanks smile is, well, unique. What they discovered is:
"After a great deal of experimentation, we obtained surprisingly convincing results using the following simple recipe: use actor B’s shape, B’s texture, and A’s motion (adjusted for the geometry of B’s face)."
So it seems that it is sufficient to use the movements generated by the driver and simply modify them to take account of the geometry of the actor's face.
Although the researchers don't draw any conclusion from this, it suggests that the character of an actor comes about from displaying a universal human facial expression using the physiology they happen to have.
So much for acting...