Manifold Constrained Transfer of Facial Geometric Knowledge for 3D Caricature Reconstruction

3D caricatures are important attractive elements of the interface in virtual environment such as online game. However, very limited 3D caricatures exist in the real world. Meanwhile, creating 3D caricatures manually is rather costly, and even professional skills are needed. This paper proposes a novel and effective manifold transfer algorithm to reconstruct 3D caricatures according to their original 2D caricatures. We first manually create a small dataset with only 100 3D caricature models and use them to initialize the whole 3D dataset. After that, manifold transfer algorithm is carried out to refine the dataset. The algorithm comprises of two steps. The first is to perform manifold alignment between 2D and 3D caricatures to get a "standard" manifold map; the second is to reconstruct all the 3D caricatures based on the manifold map. The proposed approach utilizes and transfers knowledge of 2D caricatures to the target 3D caricatures well. Comparative experiments show that the approach reconstructs 3D caricatures more effectively and the results conform more to the styles of the original 2D caricatures than the Principal Components Analysis (PCA) based method.