Noniterative 3D face reconstruction based on photometric stereo

3D face reconstruction is a popular area within the computer vision domain. 3D face reconstruction should ideally be achieved easily and cost-effectively, without requiring specialized equipment to estimate 3D shapes. As a result of this, many techniques for retrieving 3D shapes from 2D images have been proposed. In this paper, a novel method for 3D face reconstruction based on photometric stereo, which estimates the surface nor-mal from shading information in multiple images, hence recovering the 3D shape of a face, is proposed. In order to overcome the problems of previous approaches related to prior-knowledge regarding lighting conditions and iterative algorithms, the exemplar is synthesized with known lighting conditions from at least three images, under arbitrary lighting conditions and using an illumination reference. Experiments in 3D face recon-struction were made by verifying the proposed approach using the illumination subset of ∗Author for correspondence 389 April 30, 2008 10:39 WSPC/115-IJPRAI SPI-J068 00627 390 S.-W. Lee et al. the Max-Planck Institute face database and Yale face database B. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for 3D shape reconstruction of faces from 2D images