Approaches to acquisition of 3D facial data include laser scanners, structured
light devices and (passive) stereo vision. The laser scanner and structured light
methods allow accurate reconstruction of the 3D surface but strong light is projected
on the faces of subjects. Passive stereo vision based approaches do not require strong
light to be projected, however, it is hard to obtain comparable accuracy and robustness
of the surface reconstruction. In this paper a passive multiple view approach using
5 cameras in a ’+’ configuration is proposed that significantly increases robustness
and accuracy relative to traditional stereo vision approaches. The normalised cross
correlations of all 5 views are combined using direct projection of points instead of
the traditionally used rectified images. Also, errors caused by different perspective
deformation of the surface in the different views are reduced by using an iterative reconstruction
technique where the depth estimation of the previous iteration is used to
warp the windows of the normalised cross correlation for the different views