Igor Chalás

Automated facial landmark detection, comparison and visualization

Anthropometric facial landmarks and their detection has wide application in anthropology and forensic science. More specifically, these landmarks play an important role in facial comparison, in the analysis of morphological changes during human growth and in searching for the variability of human faces (e.g., sexual dimorphism). The automatic extraction of landmarks is a challenging area and specific visualization methods serving for the comparison are crucial for the correct interpretation of the results. In this paper we introduce a novel system which incorporates a newly proposed algorithm for automatic landmark detection. The algorithm is based on surface curvature and symmetric profile extraction. The landmarks are then used in the Generalized Procrustes analysis for facial comparison. Our system also introduces appropriate visualization methods supporting the presentation and understandability of the results.

Generation of Variable Human Faces from 3D Scan Dataset

Generating human faces is an important task in many research and application fields, including the gaming industry. When the scene contains many characters, it becomes impracticable to create all individual characters manually. On the other hand, the requirement for the different appearance of faces of individuals in a crowd is now more in demand. In this paper we propose our solution to the automatic generation of human faces. Our solution synthesizes facial parts coming from scans of real human faces; a process that is completely automatic. However, the user has the possibility to further adjust the composite by designing replacements, leading to a desired appearance. The final composite can be exported and attached to a given avatar. As the perception of the variability of resulting composites is in our focus as well, we also present results of the user study which was designed for this purpose. The study aims to reveal the minimal changes of the facial parts which are necessary to make in order to perceive a given facial model as different from the original one.