560 research outputs found
Automatic landmark annotation and dense correspondence registration for 3D human facial images
Dense surface registration of three-dimensional (3D) human facial images
holds great potential for studies of human trait diversity, disease genetics,
and forensics. Non-rigid registration is particularly useful for establishing
dense anatomical correspondences between faces. Here we describe a novel
non-rigid registration method for fully automatic 3D facial image mapping. This
method comprises two steps: first, seventeen facial landmarks are automatically
annotated, mainly via PCA-based feature recognition following 3D-to-2D data
transformation. Second, an efficient thin-plate spline (TPS) protocol is used
to establish the dense anatomical correspondence between facial images, under
the guidance of the predefined landmarks. We demonstrate that this method is
robust and highly accurate, even for different ethnicities. The average face is
calculated for individuals of Han Chinese and Uyghur origins. While fully
automatic and computationally efficient, this method enables high-throughput
analysis of human facial feature variation.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl
A quantitative assessment of 3D facial key point localization ο¬tting 2D shape models to curvature information
This work addresses the localization of 11 prominent facial landmarks in 3D by ο¬tting state of the art shape models to 2D data. Quantitative results are provided for 34 scans at high resolution (texture maps of 10 M-pixels) in terms of accuracy (with respect to manual measurements) and precision (repeatability on different images from the same individual). We obtain an average accuracy of approximately 3 mm, and median repeatability of inter-landmark distances typically below 2 mm, which are values comparable to current algorithms on automatic localization of facial landmarks. We also show that, in our experiments, the replacement of texture information by curvature features produced little change in performance, which is an important ο¬nding as it suggests the applicability of the method to any type of 3D data
Robust signatures for 3D face registration and recognition
PhDBiometric authentication through face recognition has been an active area of
research for the last few decades, motivated by its application-driven demand. The popularity
of face recognition, compared to other biometric methods, is largely due to its
minimum requirement of subject co-operation, relative ease of data capture and similarity
to the natural way humans distinguish each other.
3D face recognition has recently received particular interest since three-dimensional
face scans eliminate or reduce important limitations of 2D face images, such as illumination
changes and pose variations. In fact, three-dimensional face scans are usually captured
by scanners through the use of a constant structured-light source, making them invariant
to environmental changes in illumination. Moreover, a single 3D scan also captures the
entire face structure and allows for accurate pose normalisation.
However, one of the biggest challenges that still remain in three-dimensional face
scans is the sensitivity to large local deformations due to, for example, facial expressions.
Due to the nature of the data, deformations bring about large changes in the 3D geometry
of the scan. In addition to this, 3D scans are also characterised by noise and artefacts such
as spikes and holes, which are uncommon with 2D images and requires a pre-processing
stage that is speci c to the scanner used to capture the data.
The aim of this thesis is to devise a face signature that is compact in size and
overcomes the above mentioned limitations. We investigate the use of facial regions and
landmarks towards a robust and compact face signature, and we study, implement and
validate a region-based and a landmark-based face signature. Combinations of regions and
landmarks are evaluated for their robustness to pose and expressions, while the matching
scheme is evaluated for its robustness to noise and data artefacts
Automatic Landmarking for Non-cooperative 3D Face Recognition
This thesis describes a new framework for 3D surface landmarking and evaluates its performance for feature localisation on human faces. This framework has two main parts that can be designed and optimised independently. The first one is a keypoint detection system that returns positions of interest for a given mesh surface by using a learnt dictionary of local shapes. The second one is a labelling system, using model fitting approaches that establish a one-to-one correspondence between the set of unlabelled input points and a learnt representation of the class of object to detect.
Our keypoint detection system returns local maxima over score maps that are generated from an arbitrarily large set of local shape descriptors. The distributions of these descriptors (scalars or histograms) are learnt for known landmark positions on a training dataset in order to generate a model. The similarity between the input descriptor value for a given vertex and a model shape is used as a descriptor-related score.
Our labelling system can make use of both hypergraph matching techniques and rigid registration techniques to reduce the ambiguity attached to unlabelled input keypoints for which a list of model landmark candidates have been seeded. The soft matching techniques use multi-attributed hyperedges to reduce ambiguity, while the registration techniques use scale-adapted rigid transformation computed from 3 or more points in order to obtain one-to-one correspondences.
Our final system achieves better or comparable (depending on the metric) results than the state-of-the-art while being more generic. It does not require pre-processing such as cropping, spike removal and hole filling and is more robust to occlusion of salient local regions, such as those near the nose tip and inner eye corners. It is also fully pose invariant and can be used with kinds of objects other than faces, provided that labelled training data is available
Heritability maps of human face morphology through large-scale automated three-dimensional phenotyping
The human face is a complex trait under strong genetic control, as evidenced by the striking visual similarity between twins. Nevertheless, heritability estimates of facial traits have often been surprisingly low or difficult to replicate. Furthermore, the construction of facial phenotypes that correspond to naturally perceived facial features remains largely a mystery. We present here a large-scale heritability study of face geometry that aims to address these issues. High-resolution, three-dimensional facial models have been acquired on a cohort of 952 twins recruited from the TwinsUK registry, and processed through a novel landmarking workflow, GESSA (Geodesic Ensemble Surface Sampling Algorithm). The algorithm places thousands of landmarks throughout the facial surface and automatically establishes point-wise correspondence across faces. These landmarks enabled us to intuitively characterize facial geometry at a fine level of detail through curvature measurements, yielding accurate heritability maps of the human face (www.heritabilitymaps.info)
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