A Survey of Different 3D Face Reconstruction Methods

3D face reconstruction is a very challenging problem in computer vision, and is used as a prerequisite for many important vision tasks, e.g., face recognition and face frontalization. The importance of 3D face reconstruction is that we can estimate illumination and pose information by using the 3D shape of the face. Since the human face is a non-rigid 3D object, estimating the 2D shape of the face is not sufficient because the 2D shape model can make 2D shapes which are not valid projection of a 3D shape. In this report, we review four different methods for 3D face reconstruction which either add constraints of 3D shapes to the 2D shape model or explicitly estimate the 3D shape of the face. The 3D reconstructed face can be used for 3D face recogntion systems and they can achieve a high successful identification rate on different databases e.g., PIE and FERET.