Crossposted on 43rd State Blues
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. ~William Shakespeare
Human faces are familiar to our visual systems.
We easily recognize a person's face in arbitrary lighting conditions and in a variety of poses; detect small appearance changes; and notice subtle expression details. Can computer vision systems process face images as well as human vision systems can? Face image processing has potential applications in surveillance, image and video search, social networking and other domains.
Face Geometry and Appearance Modeling: Concepts and Applications, by Zicheng Liu, Zhengyou Zhang provides a systematic description of modeling face geometry and appearance from images, including information on mathematical tools, physical concepts, image processing and computer vision techniques, and concrete prototype systems.
The book is a reference for researchers and graduate students in computer vision, computer graphics and multimedia, as well as application developers who would like to gain a better understanding of the state of the art.
The human face has fascinated people since time immemorial and many scientists would agree that, aside from the brain itself, the face is the most intriguing part of the human body. Attempting to emulate its form and function by computer is an extremely challenging problem because people are very sensitive to even the smallest shortcomings and defects in facial models. Liu and Zhang boldly tackle the difficult challenge of modeling the form and appearance of the face. The value of their book is enhanced tremendously by the fact that it not only presents and discusses their own work in detail, but also that delves into the technical details of a plethora of related methodologies and algorithms contributed by other researchers. - Demetri Terzopoulos, The Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles
In Two- and Three-Dimensional Patterns of the Face, Peter W. Hallinan, Gaile Gordon, A. L. Yuille, Peter Giblin and David Mumford discuss the fact that the human face is perhaps the most familiar and easily recognized object in the world, yet both its three-dimensional shape and its two-dimensional images are complex and hard to characterize.
This book develops the vocabulary of ridges and parabolic curves, of illumination eigenfaces and elastic warpings for describing the perceptually salient features of a face and its images. The authors also explore the underlying mathematics and applies these mathematical techniques to the computer vision problem of face recognition, using both optical and range images.
One can distinguish various themes running through the dialogue: invariants defined by elliptic equations and their applications in low-dimensional topology; symplectic and contact geometry; algebraic manifolds; the challenging open questions involving the geometry of even "well-known" 4-manifolds; the need for interesting new constructions; and the rapid advances that have been made.
The books convey a wonderful sense of the vast areas lying beyond our current understanding.
My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie. ~Toni Morrison