Human face rendering

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-60).Human skin exhibits complex light reflectance properties that make it difficult to render realistically. In recent years, many techniques have been introduced to render skin, with varying degrees of complexity and realism. In this thesis, I will implement several of these techniques, and use them to render scenes with various lighting and geometry parameters, in order to compare their strengths and weaknesses. My goal is to provide a clearer understanding of which rendering techniques are most effective in different scenarios.by Arturo Andrew Arizpe.M.Eng

Perceptual Qualities of Optically Mixed Materials

We present a novel setup in which real objects made of two different materials can be mixed optically in a linearly weighted manner. We conducted a psychophysical experiment in which observers rated optical mixtures of the three combinations of glossy, matte, and velvety green birds. The observers rated the materials on four scales: matte–glossy, hard–soft, cold–warm, and light-heavy. The judgments were found to be consistent and varied systematically with the weights of the contributions. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down

Human Skin Modelling and Rendering

Creating realistic-looking skin is one of the holy grails of computer graphics and is still an active area of research. The problem is challenging due to the inherent complexity of skin and its variations, not only across individuals but also spatially and temporally among one. Skin appearance and reflectance vary spatially in one individual depending on its location on the human body, but also vary temporally with the aging process and the body state. Emotions, health, physical activity, and cosmetics for example can all affect the appearance of skin. The spatially varying reflectance of skin is due to many parameters, such as skin micro- and meso-geometry, thickness, oiliness, and pigmentation. It is therefore a daunting task to derive a model that will include all these parameters to produce realistic-looking skin. The problem is also compounded by the fact that we are very well accustomed to the appearance of skin and especially sensitive to facial appearances and expressions. Skin modelling and rendering is crucial for many applications such as games, virtual reality, films, and the beauty industry, to name a few. Realistic-looking skin improves the believability and realism of applications. The complexity of skin makes the topic of skin modelling and rendering for computer graphics a very difficult, but highly stimulating one. Skin deformations and biomechanics is a vast topic that we will not address in this dissertation. We rather focus our attention on skin optics and present a simple model for the reflectance of human skin along with a system to support skin modelling and rendering

Analysis of Human Faces Using a Measurement-Based Skin Reflectance Model

We have measured 3D face geometry, skin reflectance, and subsurface scattering using custom-built devices for 149 subjects of varying age, gender, and race. We developed a novel skin reflectance model whose parameters can be estimated from measurements. The model decomposes the large amount of measured skin data into a spatially-varying analytic BRDF, a diffuse albedo map, and diffuse subsurface scattering. Our model is intuitive, physically plausible, and -- since we do not use the original measured data -- easy to edit as well. High-quality renderings come close to reproducing real photographs. The analysis of the model parameters for our sample population reveals variations according to subject age, gender, skin type, and external factors (e.g., sweat, cold, or makeup). Using our statistics, a user can edit the overall appearance of a face (e.g., changing skin type and age) or change small-scale features using texture synthesis (e.g., adding moles and freckles). We are making the collected statistics publicly available to the research community for applications in face synthesis and analysis.Engineering and Applied Science

EMS: 3D Eyebrow Modeling from Single-view Images

Eyebrows play a critical role in facial expression and appearance. Although the 3D digitization of faces is well explored, less attention has been drawn to 3D eyebrow modeling. In this work, we propose EMS, the first learning-based framework for single-view 3D eyebrow reconstruction. Following the methods of scalp hair reconstruction, we also represent the eyebrow as a set of fiber curves and convert the reconstruction to fibers growing problem. Three modules are then carefully designed: RootFinder firstly localizes the fiber root positions which indicates where to grow; OriPredictor predicts an orientation field in the 3D space to guide the growing of fibers; FiberEnder is designed to determine when to stop the growth of each fiber. Our OriPredictor is directly borrowing the method used in hair reconstruction. Considering the differences between hair and eyebrows, both RootFinder and FiberEnder are newly proposed. Specifically, to cope with the challenge that the root location is severely occluded, we formulate root localization as a density map estimation task. Given the predicted density map, a density-based clustering method is further used for finding the roots. For each fiber, the growth starts from the root point and moves step by step until the ending, where each step is defined as an oriented line with a constant length according to the predicted orientation field. To determine when to end, a pixel-aligned RNN architecture is designed to form a binary classifier, which outputs stop or not for each growing step. To support the training of all proposed networks, we build the first 3D synthetic eyebrow dataset that contains 400 high-quality eyebrow models manually created by artists. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed EMS pipeline on a variety of different eyebrow styles and lengths, ranging from short and sparse to long bushy eyebrows.Comment: To appear in SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 (Journal Track). 19 pages, 19 figures, 6 table

Perceptual quality of BRDF approximations: dataset and metrics

International audienceBidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions (BRDFs) are pivotal to the perceived realism in image synthesis. While measured BRDF datasets are available, reflectance functions are most of the time approximated by analytical formulas for storage efficiency reasons. These approximations are often obtained by minimizing metrics such as L 2 —or weighted quadratic—distances, but these metrics do not usually correlate well with perceptual quality when the BRDF is used in a rendering context, which motivates a perceptual study. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we perform a large-scale user study to assess the perceptual quality of 2026 BRDF approximations, resulting in 84138 judgments across 1005 unique participants. We explore this dataset and analyze perceptual scores based on material type and illumination. Second, we assess nine analytical BRDF models in their ability to approximate tabulated BRDFs. Third, we assess several image-based and BRDF-based (Lp, optimal transport and kernel distance) metrics in their ability to approximate perceptual similarity judgments