A Dense Deformable Model for Craniofacial Reconstruction

The traditional craniofacial reconstruction methods construct the face shape according to the soft tissue thickness measured at a sparse set of landmarks on the skull. But the landmarks are difficult to detect and generally need human interactive assistance. The quantity and position of the landmarks lack for uniform definition. We propose an automatic craniofacial reconstruction method based on a dense deformable model. To construct the model, hundreds of skull and face samples are acquired by CT scanner. A dense mesh registration algorithm is proposed to build the point-to-point correspondences of the samples. Based on the aligned samples, the deformable model is constructed. For a given skull, the reconstructed face is obtained by a model matching procedure. Experimental results indicate that the deformable model has good performance for craniofacial reconstruction.