• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.506-515
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a Real-time Interactive Shadow Avatar(RISA) which can express facial emotions changing as response of user's gestures. The avatar's shape is a virtual Shadow constructed from the real-time sampled picture of user's shape. Several predefined facial animations overlap on the face area of the virtual Shadow, according to the types of hand gestures. We use the background subtraction method to separate the virtual Shadow, and a simplified region-based tracking method is adopted for tracking hand positions and detecting hand gestures. In order to express smooth change of emotions, we use a refined morphing method which uses many more frames in contrast with traditional dynamic emoticons. RISA can be directly applied to the area of interface media arts and we expect the detecting scheme of RISA would be utilized as an alternative media interface for DMB and camera phones which need simple input devices, in the near future.