3D Shape Extraction of Human Face in Presence of Facial Hair: A Profilometric Approach

The increasing use of 3D modeling of human face in face recognition systems, user interfaces, graphics , gaming and the like has made it an area of active study. Majority of the 3D sensors rely on color coded light projection for 3D estimation. Such systems fail to generate any response in regions covered by facial hair (like beard, mustache), and hence generate holes in the model which have to be filled manually later on. We propose the use of wavelet transform based analysis to extract the 3D model of human faces from a sinusoidal white light fringe projected image. Our method requires only a single image as input. The method is robust to texture variations on the face due to space-frequency localization property of the wavelet transform. It can generate models to pixel level refinement as the phase is estimated for each pixel by a continuous wavelet transform. In cases of sparse facial hair, the shape distortions due to hairs can be filtered out , yielding an estimate for the underlying face. We use a low-pass filtering approach to estimate the face texture from the same image. We demonstrate the method on several human faces both with and without facial hairs. Unseen views of the face are generated by texture mapping on different rotations of the obtained 3D structure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate 3D for human faces in presence of facial hair structures like beard and mustache without generating holes in those areas.