A fast 3D-AAM method using the estimated depth information

A 3D face shape derived from 2D images may be useful in many applications, such as face recognition, face synthesis and human computer interaction. To do this, we develop a fast 3D Active Appearance Model (3D-AAM) method using depth estimation. The training images include specific 3D face poses which are extremely different from one another. The landmark´s depth information of landmarks is estimated from the training image sequence by using the approximated Jacobian matrix. It is added at the test phase to deal with the 3D pose variations of the input face. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently fit the face shape, including the variations of facial expressions and 3D pose variations, better than the typical AAM, and can estimate accurate 3D face shape from images.