A regional method for craniofacial reconstruction based on coordinate adjustments and a new fusion strategy

Craniofacial reconstruction recreates a facial outlook from the cranium based on the relationship between the face and the skull to assist identification. But craniofacial structures are very complex, and this relationship is not the same in different craniofacial regions. Several regional methods have recently been proposed, these methods segmented the face and skull into regions, and the relationship of each region is then learned independently, after that, facial regions for a given skull are estimated and finally glued together to generate a face. Most of these regional methods use vertex coordinates to represent the regions, and they define a uniform coordinate system for all of the regions. Consequently, the inconsistence in the positions of regions between different individuals is not eliminated before learning the relationships between the face and skull regions, and this reduces the accuracy of the craniofacial reconstruction. In order to solve this problem, an improved regional method is proposed in this paper involving two types of coordinate adjustments. One is the global coordinate adjustment performed on the skulls and faces with the purpose to eliminate the inconsistence of position and pose of the heads; the other is the local coordinate adjustment performed on the skull and face regions with the purpose to eliminate the inconsistence of position of these regions. After these two coordinate adjustments, partial least squares regression (PLSR) is used to estimate the relationship between the face region and the skull region. In order to obtain a more accurate reconstruction, a new fusion strategy is also proposed in the paper to maintain the reconstructed feature regions when gluing the facial regions together. This is based on the observation that the feature regions usually have less reconstruction errors compared to rest of the face. The results demonstrate that the coordinate adjustments and the new fusion strategy can significantly improve the craniofacial reconstructions.