From coarse to fine correspondence of 3-D facial images and its application to 3-D facial caricaturing

We propose a method to generate a facial caricature depending on a simple method for corresponding 3-D facial images. In this method, we extract several facial parts regions each of which include facial parts of the face by using both gray and range images. The diagonal corners of the respective extracted regions are used to provide the informations on the correspondence between the faces. Therefore, by using this method, it is expectable to reduce the number of the feature points for the correspondence from more than several hundreds to ten or so. At the same time, this method makes it possible to extract boundaries of facial parts. In order to examine the feasibility of this method, we employ a usual corresponding method of the triangular patch as the reference. We generated the 3-D mean face and 3-D facial caricature to demonstrate experimentally the feasibility of the proposed method. It was clarified that the number of the correspondence points can be reduced to only 10% of the usual method.