Fast 3D face reconstruction based on uncalibrated photometric stereo

This paper proposes a fast algorithm for three-dimensional face reconstruction using uncalibrated Photometric Stereo. With a reference face model, lighting parameters are estimated from input face images lighted by unknown illumination, which can be used in classical photometric stereo to estimate surface normal and albedo. The estimated results are used in turn to refine the lighting parameters until an optimal estimation of the surface normal is achieved. Differing from traditional optimization algorithms, the iteration method used in this paper is a unified process thus results accurate lighting estimation. The proposed method relaxes lighting constraints and simplifies the image acquisition procedure. The reconstructed results tested on YaleB and BU3D databases show the effectiveness of our method.