3D face econstruction from a single 2D face image

Abstract

T3D face reconstruction from a single 2D image is mathematically ill-posed. However, to solve ill-posed problems in the area of computer vision, a variety of methods has been proposed; some of the solutions are to estimate latent information or to apply model based approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel method to reconstruct a 3D face from a single 2D face image based on pose estimation and a deformable model of 3D face shape. For 3D face reconstruction from a single 2D face image, it is the first task to estimate the depth lost by 2D projection of 3D faces. Applying the EM algorithm to facial landmarks in a 2D image, we propose a pose estimation algorithm to infer the pose parameters of rotation, scaling, and translation. After estimating the pose, much denser points are interpolated between the landmark points by a 3D deformable model and barycentric coordinates. As opposed to previous literature, our method can locate facial feature points automatically in a 2D facial image. Moreover, we also show that the proposed method for pose estimation can be successfully applied to 3D face reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can produce reliable results for reconstructing photorealistic 3D faces.