Fine-grained 3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image using Illumination Priors

3D face reconstruction has a wide range of applications, but it is still a challenging problem, especially when dealing with a single image. Inspired by recent works in face illumination estimation and face animation from video, we propose a novel method for 3D face renconstruction with geometric details from a single image by using three steps. First, a coarse 3D face is generated in morphable model space by landmarks alignment. Afterwards, using the face illumination priors and surface normals generated from the coarse 3D face, we estimate both illumination condition and facial texture, making it possible for the final step that refines geometric details through shape-from-shading method. Experiments prove that our method outperforms state-of-the-art method in terms of accuracy and geometric preservation.