Contour-based 3D Face Modeling from a Monocular Video

In this paper, we present a novel 3D face modeling approach from a monocular video captured using a conventional camera. The proposed algorithm relies on matching a generic 3D face model to the outer contours of the face to be modeled and a few of its internal features. At the first stage of the method, we estimate the head pose by comparing the edges extracted from video frames, with the contours extracted from a generic face model. Next, the generic face model is adapted to the actual 3D face by global and local deformations. An affine model is used for global deformation. The 3D model is locally deformed by computing the optimal perturbations of a sparse set of control points using a stochastic search optimization method. The deformations are integrated over a set of poses in the video sequence, leading to an accurate 3D model.