FaceAtlasAR: Atlas of Facial Acupuncture Points in Augmented Reality
This addresses the problem of skill-related errors in acupuncture point localization for inexperienced practitioners or self-users, though it is an incremental application of existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of accurately mapping facial acupuncture points for individuals by proposing FaceAtlasAR, a real-time augmented reality system that localizes and visualizes these points at 60FPS, enabling users without skills to locate them for self-training or treatment.
Acupuncture is a technique in which practitioners stimulate specific points on the body. Those points, called acupuncture points (or acupoints), anatomically define areas on the skin relative to specific landmarks on the body. However, mapping the acupoints to individuals could be challenging for inexperienced acupuncturists. In this project, we proposed a system to localize and visualize facial acupoints for individuals in an augmented reality (AR) context. This system combines a face alignment model and a hair segmentation model to provide dense reference points for acupoints localization in real-time (60FPS). The localization process takes the proportional bone (B-cun or skeletal) measurement method, which is commonly operated by specialists; however, in the real practice, operators sometimes find it inaccurate due to skill-related error. With this system, users, even without any skills, can locate the facial acupoints as a part of the self-training or self-treatment process.