3D Reconstruction of Human Faces from Reflectance Fields

Human viewers are extremely sensitive to the appearanceof peoples faces, which makes the rendering of realistic human faces a challenging problem. Techniques for doing this have continuously been invented and evolved since more than thirty years. This thesis makes use of recent methods within the area of image based rendering, namely the acquisition of reflectance fields from human faces. The reflectance fields are used to synthesize and realistically render models of human faces. A shape from shading technique, assuming that human skin adheres to the Phong model, has been used to estimate surface normals. Belief propagation in graphs has then been used to enforce integrability before reconstructing the surfaces. Finally, the additivity of light has been used to realistically render the models. The resulting models closely resemble the subjects from which they were created, and can realistically be rendered from novel directions in any illumination environment.