With systems for acquiring 3D surface data being evermore commonplace, it has become important to reliably extract specific shapes from the acquired data. In the presence of noise and occlusions, this can be done through the use of statistical shape models, which are learned from databases of clean examples of the shape in question. In this paper, we review, analyze and compare different statistical models: from those that analyze the variation in geometry globally to those that analyze the variation in geometry locally. We first review how different types of models have been used in the literature, then proceed to define the models and analyze them theoretically, in terms of both their statistical and computational aspects. We then perform extensive experimental comparison on the task of model fitting, and give intuition about which type of model is better for a few applications. Due to the wide availability of databases of high-quality data, we use the human face as the specific shape we wish to extract from corrupted data.
We present a statistical model for $3$D human faces in varying expression, which decomposes the surface of the face using a wavelet transform, and learns many localized, decorrelated multilinear models on the resulting coefficients. Using this model we are able to reconstruct faces from noisy and occluded $3$D face scans, and facial motion sequences. Accurate reconstruction of face shape is important for applications such as tele-presence and gaming. The localized and multi-scale nature of our model allows for recovery of fine-scale detail while retaining robustness to severe noise and occlusion, and is computationally efficient and scalable. We validate these properties experimentally on challenging data in the form of static scans and motion sequences. We show that in comparison to a global multilinear model, our model better preserves fine detail and is computationally faster, while in comparison to a localized PCA model, our model better handles variation in expression, is faster, and allows us to fix identity parameters for a given subject.
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of facial feature point detection with the assistance of abundant manually labeled images. Facial feature point detection favors many applications such as face recognition, animation, tracking, hallucination, expression analysis and 3D face modeling. Existing methods can be categorized into the following four groups: constrained local model (CLM)-based, active appearance model (AAM)-based, regression-based, and other methods. CLM-based methods consist of a shape model and a number of local experts, each of which is utilized to detect a facial feature point. AAM-based methods fit a shape model to an image by minimizing texture synthesis errors. Regression-based methods directly learn a mapping function from facial image appearance to facial feature points. Besides the above three major categories of methods, there are also minor categories of methods which we classify into other methods: graphical model-based methods, joint face alignment methods, independent facial feature point detectors, and deep learning-based methods. Though significant progress has been made, facial feature point detection is limited in its success by wild and real-world conditions: variations across poses, expressions, illuminations, and occlusions. A comparative illustration and analysis of representative methods provide us a holistic understanding and deep insight into facial feature point detection, which also motivates us to explore promising future directions.
Face analysis techniques have become a crucial component of human-machine interaction in the fields of assistive and humanoid robotics. However, the variations in head-pose that arise naturally in these environments are still a great challenge. In this paper, we present a real-time capable 3D face modelling framework for 2D in-the-wild images that is applicable for robotics. The fitting of the 3D Morphable Model is based exclusively on automatically detected landmarks. After fitting, the face can be corrected in pose and transformed back to a frontal 2D representation that is more suitable for face recognition. We conduct face recognition experiments with non-frontal images from the MUCT database and uncontrolled, in the wild images from the PaSC database, the most challenging face recognition database to date, showing an improved performance. Finally, we present our SCITOS G5 robot system, which incorporates our framework as a means of image pre-processing for face analysis.