3D Facial Surface and Texture Synthesis Using 2D Landmarks from a Single Face Sketch

This paper presents an approach to construct a 3D face model from a sparse set of 2D facial landmarks. This system takes the 2D landmarks extracted from a 2D portrait sketch image of an artist creation and estimates their corresponding 3D landmarks by using a statistical estimation. Then, the 3D surface and its texture are synthesized to fit to the 3D landmarks and its facial descriptions by using an example-based surface and texture synthesis technique. The 3D surface and its texture can also be further altered by a surface and texture blending technique which is particular useful for cartoon face modeling. The evaluation shows that the reconstructed 3D faces are highly similar to the ground-truth examples. This approach can be used in many face modeling applications such as in 3D avatar creation, cartoon face modeling, and police investigations.