Crafting 3D faces using free form portrait sketching and plausible texture inference

In this paper we propose a sketch-based interface for drawing and generating a realistic 3D human face with texture. The free form sketch-based interface allows a user to intuitively draw a portrait as in traditional pencil sketching way. Then, the user’s drawing is automatically reshaped to an accurate natural human facial shape with the guidance of a statistical description model, and an artistic-style portrait rendering technique is used to render the work-in-progress face sketch. Furthermore, with additional user-specified information, e.g., gender, ethnicity, and skin tone, a realistic face texture can be synthesized for the portrait through our probabilistic face texture inference model. Lastly, the textured portrait will be further used to construct a realistic 3D face model by the 3D morphable face model algorithm. Through our preliminary user evaluations, we found that with this system, even novice users were able to efficiently craft a sound 3D realistic face within three minutes.