Sample based 3D face reconstruction from a single frontal image by adaptive locally linear embedding

In this paper, we propose a highly automatic approach for 3D photorealistic face reconstruction from a single frontal image. The key point of our work is the implementation of adaptive manifold learning approach. Beforehand, an active appearance model (AAM) is trained for automatic feature extraction and adaptive locally linear embedding (ALLE) algorithm is utilized to reduce the dimensionality of the 3D database. Then, given an input frontal face image, the corresponding weights between 3D samples and the image are synthesized adaptively according to the AAM selected facial features. Finally, geometry reconstruction is achieved by linear weighted combination of adaptively selected samples. Radial basis function (RBF) is adopted to map facial texture from the frontal image to the reconstructed face geometry. The texture of invisible regions between the face and the ears is interpolated by sampling from the frontal image. This approach has several advantages: (1) Only a single frontal face image is needed for highly automatic face reconstruction; (2) Compared with former works, our reconstruction approach provides higher accuracy; (3) Constraint based RBF texture mapping provides natural appearance for reconstructed face.