A Comparison of Three 3-D Facial Reconstruction Approaches

We compare three computer vision approaches to 3-D reconstruction, namely passive binocular stereo and active structured lighting and photometric stereo, in application to human face reconstruction for modelling virtual humans. An integrated lab environment was set up to simultaneously acquire images for 3-D reconstruction and corresponding data from a 3-D scanner. This allowed us to quantitatively compare reconstruction results to accurate ground truth. Our goal was to determine whether any current computer vision approach is accurate enough for practically useful 3-D facial surface reconstruction. Comparative experiments show the combination of structured lighting with symmetric dynamic programming based binocular stereo has good prospects due to reasonable processing time and sufficient accuracy