Development of 3D measuring techniques for the analysis of facial soft tissue change

Three-dimensional facial information is very important for assessing the influence of clef lip repair and measuring the facial growth between cleft and non-cleft children. In this paper, 3D techniques for measuring facial soft tissue change and extracting useful 3D shape information axe presented. Firstly, a robust 3D registration algorithm which combines landmark-based and surface-based registration techniques is described. It uses a new surface-based registration algorithm - MCP algorithm to refine landmark-based alignment. We then describe a graphical user interface for manually extracting 3D facial landmarks. Experimental tests on both simulated surface data and real facial scans have been carried out to validate the HICP algorithm.