I run a startup specializing in this space called the 3D Avatar Store (www.3d-avatar-store.com).
3D Reconstruction of human faces is literally on the edge of mainstream. I'm betting on it, personally.
Our system is similar as theirs, but more general: we laser scanned 300,000 real people and then associated each laser scan with dozens of photos of that person taken from different angles, lighting conditions and expressions. That data set was then used for a neural net training - actually a pipeline of neural nets.
We can accept 1 photo and get back a good quality 3D model, or a series of photos and get better quality, or HD quality video and get back frame by frame, in expression reconstructions just like their solution. In fact, our system is able to recover 36 people per video feed in real time, as well as handle 4 video feeds at once. We don't need as much reference information as they do, because we trained our system to generally understand the human facial form, rather than their solution that operates in isolation for a single reconstruction operation.
Our current system is targeted as a WebAPI for games and serious simulations - enabling 3rd parties to implement "put yourself in the game" functionality. As such we have 3 different geometry outputs aimed at game/simulation developers. We also do facial recognition, and we have a special "forensic" output for that.
Our current "best output" is purposely "Pixar like" rather than realistic. Taking them realistic tends to freak people out - especially women (seems like our culture has trained women to have an idealized self image, and when presented with their non-mirror true form, they don't like it.)
Very nice! Our work is different though: we create high detail 3d moving 3d models from youtube videos -- without any manual interaction (looks like there is quite a bit of interaction in creation of an avatar on 3d-avatar-store)
Ira
http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~kemelmi/
The interaction is primarily there to support users who supply poor quality photos. Given a photo taken with an actual lens (not a mobile phone's pin hole) the manual portion can be skipped. Plus, since we are only exposing single photo input (because given the opportunity to supply multiple photos, most users supply multiple garbage photos) certain profile features are difficult to recover. So we have a "3D detailing" interface so people can adjust their profile and add smile creases and so on. That 3D detailing interface also allows for exaggeration - which is how the avatar on our home page is presented.
Your work is very nice as well. Like yours, our video version requires no manual interaction. It's primarily used by government agencies, and we've not exposed it to the public yet.
And it looks like our site is under attack at the moment. If it does not load, give it a beat. We are seeing thousands of hits per second from eastern Europe right now. (Thank you Federal Reserve quality hardware firewall!)
3D Reconstruction of human faces is literally on the edge of mainstream. I'm betting on it, personally.
Our system is similar as theirs, but more general: we laser scanned 300,000 real people and then associated each laser scan with dozens of photos of that person taken from different angles, lighting conditions and expressions. That data set was then used for a neural net training - actually a pipeline of neural nets.
We can accept 1 photo and get back a good quality 3D model, or a series of photos and get better quality, or HD quality video and get back frame by frame, in expression reconstructions just like their solution. In fact, our system is able to recover 36 people per video feed in real time, as well as handle 4 video feeds at once. We don't need as much reference information as they do, because we trained our system to generally understand the human facial form, rather than their solution that operates in isolation for a single reconstruction operation.
Our current system is targeted as a WebAPI for games and serious simulations - enabling 3rd parties to implement "put yourself in the game" functionality. As such we have 3 different geometry outputs aimed at game/simulation developers. We also do facial recognition, and we have a special "forensic" output for that.
Our current "best output" is purposely "Pixar like" rather than realistic. Taking them realistic tends to freak people out - especially women (seems like our culture has trained women to have an idealized self image, and when presented with their non-mirror true form, they don't like it.)
You can learn more at these links: https://3d-avatar-store.com/Web-API-Features-May-2014 https://3d-avatar-store.com/3D-Avatar-Creation-walkthru https://3d-avatar-store.com/New-Face-Finder