Comparative study of 3D face acquisition techniques

Today, communication devices are evolving towards friendly–user interactivity while permanently eyeing towards 3D display technologies. As such, 3D face generation, modelling and animation techniques are in the frontline to design realistic animated 3D talking faces. Simple, reliable and economic, 2D image processing techniques have been widely used to reconstruct 3D faces. This paper focuses on the comparison of different 2D imaging techniques for 3D face generation. Stereo Vision techniques, using either automatic stereo correspondence algorithm or manual feature points location, Orthogonal Views and Photometric Stereo approaches are introduced and applied to acquire face 3D data. In addition, generated reconstruction results are compared qualitatively and quantitatively.