Towards an illumination-based 3D active appearance model for fast face alignment

Abstract

A novel 3D active appearance model invariant to illumination is presented. 3D-IAAM (Tridimensional Illumination-based Active Appearance Model) is capable of representing human faces with any identity, pose and illumination condition and it was tested for face synthesis by creating faces with multiple identities, poses and illuminations. We also propose an illumination-invariant 3D face alignment algorithm based on our model which is suitable for fast estimation of 3D pose and structure of faces. In this work, we model the illumination to do the alignment, instead of eliminating its effects, with the possibility of obtaining additional information about the original lighting at the end of the fitting process. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.