A facial symmetry prior for improved illumination fitting of 3D morphable model

3D face reconstruction from a single 2D image can be performed using a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) in an analysis-by-synthesis approach. However, the reconstruction is an ill-posed problem. The recovery of the illumination characteristics of the 2D input image is particularly difficult because the proportion of the albedo and shading contributions in a pixel intensity is ambiguous. In this paper we propose the use of a facial symmetry constraint, which helps to identify the relative contributions of albedo and shading. The facial symmetry constraint is incorporated in a multi-feature optimisation framework, which realises the fitting process. By virtue of this constraint better illumination parameters can be recovered, and as a result the estimated 3D face shape and surface texture are more accurate. The proposed method is validated on the PIE face database. The experimental results show that the introduction of facial symmetry constraint improves the performance of both, face reconstruction and face recognition.