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Landmark-based surface normalization

This task is focused on the normalization of the facial surface based on a reduced set of manual annotations and has been addressed by implementing Least Squares Conformal Maps (LSCM). The conformality condition ensures that the angles (of the mesh triangles used to describe the facial surface) are locally preserved, hence minimizing mapping distortion.

Applying LSCM to synthetic or carefully pre-processed data is rather straight-forward. However, when using real-World data (e.g. generated by scanning human faces) there is some probability in obtaining an underdetermined system of equations. In the specific case of our input data, this problem affected about 20% of the input surfaces. In a subset of these, the underdetermination led to artifacts in the generated mapping. The main causes for underdetermination were the presence of singularities and disconnected regions in the surface. From a theoretical point of view this is reasonable because the relations between neighbouring triangles can only be computed if there is a common edge, which is not available at the aforementioned cases.

Removing these artifacts resulted in well-determined systems, thus allowing the correct computation of the conformal mapping. Once this is achieved, it is possible to compute a dense correspondence between all input surfaces. Indeed, we can also re-sample them by inverting the conformal mapping. This has the advantage of providing a new representation of the input surfaces with corresponding vertices for all of them, allowing their analysis with standard multivariate methods.

 

Least Squares Conformal Mapping

Given that the face is (approximately) a genus-0 surface, it can be mapped conformaly into the 2D domain. The conformality condition ensures that the angles are locally preserved, hence minimizing mapping distortion. Under such constraints, there is a family of possible solutions with 6 degrees of freedom, related by the group of Möbius transformations [Li 2006]. At least two corresponding points are needed to make the solution unique, but additional points can be added in order to obtain a least squares solution, which would balance the localization errors of individual points [Wang 2007]. This technique was introduced by Levy et al. [Levy 2002] as Least Squares Conformal Mapping (LSCM).

Given a surface S in terms of its 3D coordinates {x,y,z} we can define a 2D parameterization {u, v} Ì R2 so that the surface is locally defined by the mapping f(u,v) ® {x,y,z}. The 1st order Taylor approximation of f(u,v) with infinitesimal displacements Du, Dv is:

where fu and fv are partial derivatives and Jf(u,v) is that Jacobian matrix, which can be decomposed as follows:

We are interested in the eigenvalues of S, i.e. s1 and s2. These are important to determine the type of metric distortion introduced by the mapping f, as follows:

·        f is isometric or length-preserving « s1 = s2 = 1

·        f is conformal or angle-preserving « s1 = s2

·        f is equiareal or area-preserving « s1 s2 = 1

Because the equality of the eigenvalues of J implies equality for those of J-1, the inverse mapping (i.e. the one from 3D to 2D) is also conformal. It shall be noted that LSCM produces a mapping that is approximately conformal, as it is well known that a discrete surface cannot, in general, be mapped into 2D under strict conformality. In [Hormann 2007] a practical implementation of LSCM is derived by noting that for a mapping to be conformal we need the gradients with respect to the parameterization variables to be orthogonal and have the same norm:

where rot90 is a 90 degree rotation (anti-clockwise in this case) and the gradients of u and v are taken with respect to a local coordinate system placed at each triangle of the surface. Thus, we end up with 2 equations per triangle that are linear in the vertex coordinates (in terms of u and v). The resulting system of equations will be underdetermined unless we fix the coordinates of 2 or more points. Once this is done the system is well-determined (as long as there are no surface artifacts like those mentioned in Section 2.1).

A typical facial scan from the datasets analyzed in this project contain between 50,000 and 300,000 triangles. With two equations per triangle, it is evident that the size of the resulting system is considerable. Fortunately, the system is also very sparse and can therefore be satisfactorily handled with libraries such as UMFPACK.

 

 

 

Fig. 1- Examples of a facial surface in 3D (left) mapped into 2D (right) by LSCM. The 3D mesh (left) has been heavily decimated so that the triangulation is easier to visualize. The mapping is performed with the constraints provided by 26 corresponding landmarks (red dots) annotated on the mesh surface.

 

 

Re-sampling of surfaces into homologous coordinates

An interesting aspect of the mapping illustrated in Fig. 1 is that the coordinates of the landmarks that are used as correspondences between 2D and 3D vary only in 3D but can be maintained fixed in 2D. That is, given a set of surfaces in 3D with the same set of anatomical landmarks annotated, they can be mapped into 2D so that those landmarks are coincident. This implies that, except for the distortion introduced by the conformal mapping, we have a common reference frame where a given 2D coordinate has the same anatomical meaning for all meshes that have been mapped.

The above, however, has an important practical limitation: the mapping is a piecewise linear function, which is defined for each mesh only at the vertices of its triangulation. In the general case different surfaces have different triangulations and their vertices will be mapped into non-coinciding coordinates in the 2D domain.

Hence, if we want to generate a representation that is homologous across surfaces we need to re-sample them. For this purpose we adopted a two-step approach:

  1. We created a new sampling grid in the 2D domain, initially with uniform spacing, and computed the inverse mapping from these new points into the original 3D surfaces. This can be done using barycentric coordinates to interpolate the (inverse) conformal mapping available at the vertices of the original triangulation.
  2. Because our mapping is not isometric but conformal, a uniform sampling in 2D does not imply a uniform sampling in 3D. This effect is quite visible, for example, near the nose tip (see Fig. 2). Thus, we iteratively correct the sampling density of the 2D grid to make the 3D density more uniform using Lloyds algorithm [Alliez 2003].

 

 

 

 

Fig. 2- Example of LSCM mapping. Left: a facial surface before any mapping (heavily decimated so that the triangulations is easier to visualize). Centre: the same surface after re-sampling using a uniform grid in the 2D domain. Right: the same surface after correction of the sampling density to homogenize the triangle areas in 3D.

 

While the above procedure can be applied individually to each surface, such a strategy would again result in different sampling positions of the 2D domain. It is preferable, instead, to apply the same sampling grid to the whole population of surfaces that have to be analyzed, so that these points can be considered pseudo-landmarks. Once this is done, all surfaces have a homologous representation and we can apply standard multivariate analysis techniques.

 

References

 

[Alliez 2003] P. Alliez, E.C. Verdiere, O. Devillers et al. Isotropic Surface Remeshing. Proc. Int. Conf. Shape Modeling, pp. 49-48, 2003.

[Hormann 2007] K. Hormann, B. Levy and A. Sheffer. Mesh Parameterization: Theory and Practice. ACM SIGGRAPH course notes, 2007.

[Levy 2002] B. Levy, S. Petitjean and N. Ray et al. Least Squares Conformal Maps for Automatic Texture Atlas Generation. Proc. Int. Conf. Computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH), pp. 362-371, 2002.

[Li 2006] H. Li and R. Hartley. New 3D Fourier descriptors for genus-zero mesh objects. In Proc. Asian Conference on Computer Vision. LNCS vol. 3851, pp 734–743, 2006.

[Wang 2007] S. Wang, Y. Wang, M. Jin et al.  Conformal Geometry and Its Applications on 3D Shape Matching, Recognition, and Stitching. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 29(7):1–12, 2007.

 

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