Near-Instant Capture of High-Resolution Facial Geometry and Reflectance

We present a near-instant method for acquiring facial geometry and reflectance using a set of commodity DSLR cameras and flashes. Our setup consists of twenty-four cameras and six flashes which are fired in rapid succession with subsets of the cameras. Each camera records only a single photograph and the total capture time is less than the 67ms blink reflex. The cameras and flashes are specially arranged to produce an even distribution of specular highlights on the face. We employ this set of acquired images to estimate diffuse color, specular intensity, specular exponent, and surface orientation at each point on the face. We further refine the facial base geometry obtained from multi-view stereo using estimated diffuse and specular photometric information. This allows final submillimeter surface mesostructure detail to be obtained via shape-from-specularity. The final system uses commodity components and produces models suitable for authoring high-quality digital human characters.