This level of realism is called Photo-realism . Our prototype device for digitizing a human face is a rig called a lightstage . Scanning a person in the lightstage is a two-phase process. In the first phase, which lasts a few seconds, the lightstage photographs a human subject s face lit from hundreds of different directions. These two components, reflectance properties and geometry, should be enough to reconstruct the appearance of a person with any light bouncing off of them from any point of view.
Active vision involves projecting patterns with a projector onto a subject.
The face s appearance under each pattern is recorded by a separate video camera. By analyzing the images of the face with different patterns on it, active vision techniques obtain a 3D model of the subject. One of the problems with using active vision technology to recover high-resolution geometry is that the geometry tends to be very noisy. It introduces sharp random features like small ridges and valleys that are not present on the actual face. We would like techniques that allow us to recover higher quality geometric information, without all of this noise.