3D face alignment without correspondences

Abstract

A novel correspondence-less approach is proposed to find a thin plate spline map between a pair of 3D human faces represented by triangular surface meshes. The proposed method works without landmark extraction and feature correspondences. The aligning transformation is simply found by solving a system of nonlinear equations. Each equation is generated by integrating a non-linear function over the surfaces represented as fuzzy sets of triangles. We derive approximating formulas for the efficient computation of these integrals. Based on a series of comparative tests on a standard 3D face dataset, our triangular mesh-based algorithm outperforms state of the art methods in terms of computing time while maintaining accuracy.