A coupled statistical model for face shape recovery

Abstract

We focus on the problem of developing a coupled statistical model that can be used to recover surface height from brightness images of faces. The idea is to couple intensity and height by jointly modeling their combined variations. The models are constructed by performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the shape coefficients for both intensity and height training data. By fitting the model to intensity data, the height information is implicitly recovered from the coupled shape parameters. Experiments show that the methods generate accurate surfaces from out-of training intensity images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.