College funded PhD Studentship in Computer Science: 3D Computer Vision for Facial Shape Modelling and Analysis

Location: Streatham Campus, University of Exeter, EX4 4QJ

Project Description:

The human face is one of the most commonly considered objects in Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. Modelling and reconstructing the detailed 3D shape and dynamics of the human face has numerous applications, such as computer-aided craniofacial surgery, facial expression recognition, human-computer interaction, augmented reality, performance capture, computer games and visual effects, to name a few.

Despite the important advances in the related scientific fields, the existing methods have several limitations, since they can only work reliably under restrictive acquisition conditions and for certain demographic groups only.

This PhD project will develop novel formulations and pioneering methodologies for dense 3D reconstruction and modelling of human faces that will be able to deal with challenging real-life image data. It will pay particularly attention to achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness to challenging scenarios, such as visual input from a commodity camera, low-resolution image data, severe occlusions, strong illumination changes and large inter-subject variability in facial morphology. It will also develop novel methodologies for automated, large-scale statistical modelling of the 3D facial surface and dynamics with unprecedented quality.