Fitting 3D Cartesian Models to Faces Using Irradiance and Integrability Constraints

Mario Castelán, Edwin R. Hancock

Abstract: This paper makes two contributions. First, we present an experimental analysis of three different ways of constructing three-dimensional statistical models of faces using Cartesian coordinates, namely, height, surface gradient and one based on Fourier domain basis functions. Second, we test the ability of each of the models for dealing with information provided by shape-from-shading by introducing a simple non-exhaustive parameter adjustment procedure subject to integrability and irradiance constraints. Experiments show that the surface gradient based representation is more robust to noise than the alternative Cartesian representations.