Three Dimensional Head Modeling Based on Direct Free Form Deformation

Abstract

Three dimensional (3D) head models are the fundamental basis for ergonomic design of head and face wearable products. This paper presents a novel intuitive modeling approach of human head from the unorganized point cloud. The approach comprises two main phases. In the first phase, a standard head was constructed from laser scanned 3D unorganized points. At the beginning, we adopted pattern recognition algorithm to automatically identify the locations of key landmarks on the head. Then we conducted interpolation and approximation of points lying on the curves in the horizontal planes passing through the mentioned above key landmarks of the head. These curves are called feature wireframe. In this way, we obtained a complete mesh model, called standard head. In the second phase, free form deformation (FFD) was applied to the standard head to perform customization of head size and shape. We used an efficient FFD method based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) for this objective. One hundred 3D human head models (all males), from the latest and largest anthropometry survey of Chinese minors conducted by Chinese National Institute of Standardization in the last decade, were used as the sample data to calculate the standard head. The proposed approach can synthesize the standard head to any customized head according to user input head dimensions. This approach can be extended to other human body segment and will benefit the ergonomic design of quite a lot of wearable products.