Optimal UV spaces for facial morphable model construction

Establishing inter-mesh dense correspondence is a key step in the process of constructing Morphable Models. The most successful approaches to date reduce this 3D correspondence problem to a 2D image morphing one by applying an interpolant in UV space - a space in which the manifold of the face is flattened into a contiguous 2D atlas. Contiguous UV spaces are natural products of the laser scanning devices popular for use in Morphable Model construction, but a wide gamut of devices can now be used to capture 3D data that do not yield a UV space representation conducive to warping. In this paper we explore how to optimally construct contiguous UV spaces from both annotated and non-annotated facial meshes with efficient cylindrical and spherical projection operations.