Creating a face model from an unknown skull based on the tissue map

The craniofacial reconstruction is employed as an initialization of the identification in forensics. In this paper we present a tissue map based craniofacial reconstruction technique. The reconstruction is formulated as the superimposition of the selected tissue map onto the novel skull. The key problem is the accurate map registration, which is implemented as a warping guided by 2D feature patterns. Given a novel skull, the feature patterns are extracted automatically under an energy minimization framework. The feature configuration on the warped tissue map is expected to resemble that on the novel skull. The target facial model is reconstructed by a smooth interpolation of the point cloud, which results from a simple addition of range images. The presented experiments demonstrate the facial outlook can be reconstructed from the tissue map feasibly and efficiently.