This book concentrates on the animation of faces. The Editors put the MPEG-4 FA standard against the historical background of research on facial animation and model-based coding, and provide a brief history of the development of the standard itself. In part 2 there is a comprehensive overview of the FA specification with the goal of helping the reader understand how the standard really works. Part 3, forms the bulk of the book and covers the implementations of the standard on both encoding and decoding side. Several face animation techniques for MPEG-4 FA decoders are presented. While the standard itself actually specifies only the decoder, for applications it is interesting to look at the wide range of technologies for producing and encoding the FA contents. These include video analysis, speech analysis and synthesis, as well as keyframe animation. The last part of the book provides several examples of applications using the MPEG-4 FA standard.It will be useful for companies implementing products and services related to the new standard, researchers in several domains related to facial animation, as well as wider technical audience interested in new technologies and applications.· * The main people involved in the standardization process are contributors to the book * Provides several examples of applications using the MPEG-4 Facial Animation standard, including video and speech analysis * This will become THE reference for the MPEG-4 Facial Animation * Aids the understanding of the reasoning behind the standard specification, how it works and what the potential applications are * Gives an overview of the technologies directly related to the standard and its implementation Essential reading for the Industry and research community especially engineers, researchers and developers.