3-D facial model estimation from single front-view facial image

A 3-D facial model can be accurately obtained from: (1) stereo facial images or (2) front- and side-view facial images. The stereo images can be obtained by two different cameras at the same time. On the other hand, capturing front- and side-view facial images requires precise location of the camera. Either may be unavailable in many practical applications. We modify several existing techniques to automatically locate the feature point position from the front-view facial image. Then several schemes (such as minimum mean square error, minimum mean absolute error, and maximum a posteriori) are used to estimate the "depth" information of the 3-D facial model parameters from the single front-view facial image according to the anthropometric and a priori information. With this scheme, a 3-D facial model can be estimated from single front-view facial image. According to the simulation results, the estimated facial model matches the exact 3-D facial model, and the synthesized and original side-view facial images appear similar.