A novel skull registration based on global and local deformations for craniofacial reconstruction

Craniofacial reconstruction is important in forensic identification. It aims to estimate a facial appearance for human skeletal remains using the relationship between the soft tissue and the underlying bone structure. Various computerized methods have been developed in recent decades. An effective way is to deform a reference skull to the discovered skull, and then apply the same deformation to the skin associated with the reference skull to provide an approximate face for the discovered skull. For this method, the better the two skulls match each other, the more face-like the reconstructed skin surface will be. In this paper, we present a novel skull registration method that can match the two skulls closely, so as to improve the accuracy of the reconstruction. It combines both global and local deformations. A generic thin-plate spline (TPS)-based deformation, which is global, is applied first to roughly align the two skulls based on two groups of manually defined landmarks. Afterwards, the two skulls are largely matched, except some regions, on which some new landmarks are automatically marked. A compact support radial basis functions (CSRBF)-based deformation, which is local, will then be performed on these regions to adjust the initial alignment of the two skulls. Such adjustment can be repeatedly implemented until the two skulls have optimal alignment. In addition, all the skulls and face involved in the registration are represented by their single outer surfaces to facilitate the reconstruction procedure. The experiments demonstrate that our method can create a plausible face even when the reference skull is very different from the discovered skull. As a result, we can make full use of our database to provide multiple estimates for a principle components analysis (PCA) for the final reconstruction.