Face shape recovery from a single image using CCA mapping between tensor spaces

In this paper, we propose a new approach for face shape recovery from a single image. A single near infrared (NIR) image is used as the input, and a mapping from the NIR tensor space to 3D tensor space, learned by using statistical learning, is used for the shape recovery. In the learning phase, the two tensor models are constructed for NIR and 3D images respectively, and a canonical correlation analysis (CCA) based multi-variate mapping from NIR to 3D faces is learned from a given training set of NIR-3D face pairs. In the reconstruction phase, given an NIR face image, the depth map is computed directly using the learned mapping with the help of tensor models. Experimental results are provided to evaluate the accuracy and speed of the method. The work provides a practical solution for reliable and fast shape recovery and modeling of 3D objects.