BabyNet: Reconstructing 3D faces of babies from uncalibrated photographs
This is a domain-specific incremental advance for applications in healthcare or entertainment requiring accurate baby 3D models.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing 3D faces of babies from uncalibrated photographs, showing that BabyNet outperforms existing methods, including a baby-specific 3D morphable model, by addressing the distinct facial geometry of babies.
We present a 3D face reconstruction system that aims at recovering the 3D facial geometry of babies from uncalibrated photographs, BabyNet. Since the 3D facial geometry of babies differs substantially from that of adults, baby-specific facial reconstruction systems are needed. BabyNet consists of two stages: 1) a 3D graph convolutional autoencoder learns a latent space of the baby 3D facial shape; and 2) a 2D encoder that maps photographs to the 3D latent space based on representative features extracted using transfer learning. In this way, using the pre-trained 3D decoder, we can recover a 3D face from 2D images. We evaluate BabyNet and show that 1) methods based on adult datasets cannot model the 3D facial geometry of babies, which proves the need for a baby-specific method, and 2) BabyNet outperforms classical model-fitting methods even when a baby-specific 3D morphable model, such as BabyFM, is used.