Synthesizing lateral face from frontal facial image using anthropometric estimation

We propose a method to synthesize a lateral face from a 2D gray-level image of a frontal face that provides only plane geometry but not the depth information for a 3D facial model. To estimate the depth information from the frontal face, we investigate the relationship between the frontal and lateral facial anthropometric parameters. According to anthropometric definitions on the head and face, we set up a database consisting of facial parameters measured from 70 Chinese male adults. The database serves as prior knowledge for the minimum mean square error estimation on lateral facial parameters. For each person, with his frontal facial image, we can construct his 3D facial model based on the measured frontal facial parameters and the estimated lateral parameters. Therefore, images of a lateral face can be synthesized by texture mapping from the frontal facial image