An Automatic Multi-sample 3D Face Registration Method Based on Thin Plate Spline and Deformable Model

Non-rigid registration of 3D facial surfaces is a crucial step in a variety of computer vision tasks. In this paper, we present a fully automatic 3D face registration method based on the thin plate spline (TPS) and deformable model. To model the non-rigid modality of complex 3D facial surfaces, the thin plate spline is adopted to represent the transformation between 3D faces. The farthest point sampling (FPS) method is used to generate the control points for the thin plate spline transformation automatically. There are two phases for 3D face registration. Firstly, the preliminary registration is obtained by closest points searching between the thin plate spline transformed reference and the target. Then the multi-sample registration is implemented to improve the precision of the registration by using a dynamical reference produced based on deformable model. To eliminate outliers countermeasures are presented in both phases. The experiments on Bu-3dfe and Bjut-3d face databases show that the proposed method is effective and robust.