Coupled 3D reconstruction of sparse facial hair and skin

Figure 1: Coupled 3D reconstruction of sparse facial hair and skin applied to various different facial hair styles. Although facial hair plays an important role in individual expres-sion, facial-hair reconstruction is not addressed by current face-capture systems. Our research addresses this limitation with an algorithm that treats hair and skin surface capture together in a cou-pled fashion so that a high-quality representation of hair fibers as well as the underlying skin surface can be reconstructed. We pro-pose a passive, camera-based system that is robust against arbitrary motion since all data is acquired within the time period of a sin-gle exposure. Our reconstruction algorithm detects and traces hairs in the captured images and reconstructs them in 3D using a multi-view stereo approach. Our coupled skin-reconstruction algorithm uses information about the detected hairs to deliver a skin surface that lies underneath all hairs irrespective of occlusions. In dense regions like eyebrows, we employ a hair-synthesis method to cre-ate hair fibers that plausibly match the image data. We demonstrate our scanning system on a number of individuals and show that it can successfully reconstruct a variety of facial-hair styles together with the underlying skin surface