3D MODELING OF FACES FROM NEAR INFRARED IMAGES USING STATISTICAL LEARNING
This paper proposes a statistical learning based method for 3D modeling of faces directly from Near Infrared (NIR) images. We use a specially designed camera system with active NIR illumination to capture the NIR images of faces. The NIR images captured in such a way are invariant to environmental lighting changes. The property provides more reasonable data sources for statistical learning. By using the NIR images and the depth images of some known faces, we can observe a mapping relation between the two image modalities. The mapping relation can then be used to recover depth data of an unknown face from his NIR image. To perform the learning, the images of different modalities taken from different persons are elaborately aligned to make pixel-to-pixel correspondences between images. Based on these aligned images, two face spaces corresponding to NIR and depth face images can be constructed, respectively. We then use a PCA based or kernel based scheme to perform the learning between spaces of large dimensions. Several regression algorithms with linear and nonlinear kernels are employed and evaluated to find the mapping that best describes the relation between the two face spaces. The experimental results show that the method presented in this paper is effective. It can reconstruct 3D face model directly from NIR image of a face with high accuracy and low computational costs.
statistical learning 3d face modeling near infrared image (nir)