Face Synthesis and Recognition from a Single Image under Arbitrary Unknown Lighting Using a Spherical Harmonic Basis Morphable M

Understanding and modifying the effects of arbitrary illumination on human faces in a realistic manner is a challenging problem both for face synthesis and recognition. Recent research demonstrates that the set of images of a convex Lambertian object obtained under a wide variety of lighting conditions can be approximated accurately by a low-dimensional linear subspace using spherical harmonics representation. Morphable models are statistical ensembles of facial properties such as shape and texture. In this paper, we integrate spherical harmonics into the morphable model framework, by proposing a 3D Spherical Harmonic Basis Morphable Model(SHBMM) and demonstrate that any face under arbitrary unknown lighting can be simply represented by three low-dimensional vectors: shape parameters, spherical harmonic basis parameters and illumination coefficients. We show that, with our SHBMM, given one single image under arbitrary unknown lighting, we can remove the illumination effects from the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Lei Zhang 0002, Sen Wang, Dimitris Samaras
• Keywords: Arbitrary Unknown Lighting, Computer Vision, CVPR 2005, Spherical Harmonic, Spherical Harmonic Basis