USC-ICT Technical Report ICT-TR-01-2012:easurement-Based Synthesis of Facial Microgeometry

We present a technique for generating microstructure-level facial geometry by augmenting a mesostructure-level facial scan with detail synthesized from a set of exemplar skin patches scanned at much higher resolution. We use constrained texture synthesis based on image analogies to increase the resolution of the facial scan in a way that is consistent with the scanned mesostructure. We digitize the exemplar patches with a polarization-based computational illumination technique which considers specular reflection and single scattering. The recorded microstructure patches can be used to synthesize full-facial microstructure detail for either the same subject or to a different subject. We show that the technique allows for greater realism in facial renderings including more accurate reproduction of skin’s specular roughness and anisotropic reflection effects.