Abstract: A reconstruction system for special human face is designed which is based on the binocular stereo vision. A 3D reconstruction method for special human face based on Snake model is presented. The stereo image pair is gathered with a calibrated camera, and the face area is segmented by skin detec-tion method. After the image pair is processed with distortion correction and epipolar line alignment, and the face area is se-lected and normalized, the correlation matching algorithm adopts pyramid structure which can balance well between error matching points and precision. An energy minimization func-tion for human face is proposed which takes into account the order matching constraint, the continuity constraint, the curva-ture estimation of every point on curve and the correlation con-straint condition. The function improves greatly the accuracy of disparity extraction, resolves the stereo matching difficulty in stereo vision area, restores successfully the 3D data of human face and realizes the reconstruction of special face. Experiments show that the algorithm which adopts the disparity extraction based on Snake model and fairing handling and texture map-ping is realistic in the reconstruction of main face part, except the deformation along partially face contour. The algorithm is effective and practical, which can restore the 3D data of special face without structured light and manual intervention.

Key words: Correlation calculation, Face 3D reconstruction, Pyramid structure, Snake model, Stereo match