An Automatic Dense Point Registration Method for 3D Face Animation

In this paper, we present an automatic point matching method to overcome the dense point alignment of scanned 3D faces. The thin plate spline (TPS) transformation is adopted to model the deformation of 3D faces, and to get fully automatic point matching method, a random point selecting method is proposed to get the controlling points for TPS transformation. Integrating this point generating method with an iterative closest point searching strategy, we achieve dense point alignment of 3D faces. 3D face animation is created by interpolation between the aligned 3D faces. The realistic 3D face animation results and the acceptable matching accuracy comparing with the point-hand placed method reveal that the proposed point matching method is efficient for dense point registration with non-rigid deformation.