Development of 3D measuring techniques for the analysis of facial soft tissue change

Abstract

Three-dimensional facial information is very important for assessing the influence of clef lip repair and measuring the facial growth between cleft and non-cleft children.In this paper, 3D techniques for measuring facial soft tissue change and extracting useful 3D shape information are presented.First ly, a robust 3D registration algorithm which combines landmark-based and surface-based registration techniques is described.It uses a new surface-based registration algorithm - HICP algorithm to refine landmark-based alignment.W e then describe a graphical user interface for manually extracting 3D facial landmarks.Ex perimental tests on both simulated surface data and real facial scans have been carried out to validate the HICP algorithm.