Dynamic and Groupwise Statistical Analysis of 3D Faces

The accurate reconstruction of facial shape is important for applications such as telepresence and gaming. It can be solved efficiently with the help of statistical shape models that constrain the shape of the reconstruction. In this talk, several methods to statistically analyze static and dynamic 3D face data are discussed. When statistically analyzing faces, various challenges arise from noisy, corrupt, or incomplete data. To overcome the limitations imposed by the poor data quality, we leverage redundancy in the data for shape processing. This is done by processing entire motion sequences in the case of dynamic data, and by jointly processing large databases in a groupwise fashion in the case of static data. First, a fully automatic approach to robustly register and statistically analyze facial motion sequences using a multilinear face model as statistical prior is proposed. Further, a statistical face model is discussed, which consists of many localized, decorrelated multilinear models. The localized and multi-scale nature of this model allows for recovery of fine-scale details while retaining robustness to severe noise and occlusions. Finally, the learning of statistical face models is formulated as a groupwise optimization framework that aims to learn a multilinear model while jointly optimizing the correspondence, or correcting the data.