Smartphone videos produce highly realistic 3D face reconstructions

Normally, it takes pricey equipment and expertise to create an accurate 3D reconstruction of someone's face that's realistic and doesn't look creepy. Now, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have pulled off the feat using video recorded on an ordinary smartphone.

Using a smartphone to shoot a continuous video of the front and sides of the face generates a dense cloud of data. A two-step process developed by CMU's Robotics Institute uses that data, with some help from deep learning algorithms, to build a digital reconstruction of the face. The team's experiments show that their method can achieve sub-millimeter accuracy, outperforming other camera-based processes.

Credit: Carnegie Mellon University