Face Capturing and Calculation of Average 3D Face Models

Average faces are used in multiple areas including biometric and social studies as well as facial recognition software. In the past average faces were computed in 2D images but these are limited if a 3D representation is needed. 3D representations usually were not textured, therefore we decided to create a fully colored 3D Mesh. We divided the averaging process into averaging mesh and averaging textures. While averaging the mesh is fairly simple, we also found a good and fully automated way of averaging the textures. We created a single application that implements the complete process of scanning faces, managing them and calculating average faces. Our result is a textured 3D representation which is more realistic than previous methods.