Human face morphing is the foundation of facial expression synthesis and talking avatar animation. In this paper

an MPEG-4 based method for human face morphing and expression synthesis is proposed. The method uses a picture of neutral human face and a group of face animation parameters (FAP)as input

and the output is a corresponding facial expression image. There are four stages: facial feature point extraction

mesh generation for specific human face

mesh points movement driven by FAPs

and face texture mapping. After these four stages

photos of various facial expressions are created. Novel algorithms are also implemented for eyeball movement and texture mapping inside the mouth. Perceptual evaluation shows that the face morphing method can synthesize realistic and natural facial expressions for various human face models of different genders

ages and races. Meanwhile

this method is real-time

so it can be used in the areas of video processing and facial animation.