3D Face Landmarking Method under Pose and Expression Variations

A robust method is presented for 3D face landmarking with facial pose and expression variations. This method is based on Multi-level Partition of Unity (MPU) Implicits without relying on texture, pose, orientation and expression information. The MPU Implicits reconstruct 3D face surface in a hierarchical way. From lower to higher reconstruction levels, the local shapes can be reconstructed gradually according to their significance. For 3D faces, three landmarks, nose, left eyehole and right eyehole, can be detected uniquely with the analysis of curvature features at lower levels. Experimental results on GavabDB database show that this method is invariant to pose, holes, noise and expression. The overall performance of 98.59% is achieved under pose and expression variations.