3D face reconstruction using images from cameras with varying parameters

In this paper, we present a new technique of 3D face reconstruction from a sequence of images taken with cameras having varying parameters without the need to grid. This method is based on the estimation of the projection matrices of the cameras from a symmetry property which characterizes the face, these projections matrices are used with points matching in each pair of images to determine the 3D points cloud, subsequently, 3D mesh of the face is constructed with 3D Crust algorithm. Lastly, the 2D image is projected on the 3D model to generate the texture mapping. The strong point of the proposed approach is to minimize the constraints of the calibration system: we calibrated the cameras from a symmetry property which characterizes the face, this property gives us the opportunity to know some points of 3D face in a specific well-chosen global reference, to formulate a system of linear and nonlinear equations according to these 3D points, their projection in the image plan and the elements of the projections matrix. Then to solve these equations, we use a genetic algorithm which consists of finding the global optimum without the need of the initial estimation and allows to avoid the local minima of the formulated cost function. Our study is conducted on real data to demonstrate the validity and the performance of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, simplicity, stability and convergence. © 2016, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.