Volume Graph Model for 3D Facial Surface Extraction

3D facial extraction from volume data is very helpful in virtual plastic surgery. Although the traditional Marching Cubes algorithm (MC) can be used for this purpose, it could not separate the facial surface from other tissue surfaces. This weakness greatly limited the accuracy of the facial model and its application in plastic surgery. In this paper a volume graph model is proposed, in which the facial surface extraction is formulated as a min-cut problem and can be solved by existing graph cut algorithm. Based on this model, irrelevant tissue surfaces are effectively excluded and a more accurate 3D virtual face can be built for plastic surgery.