Real-time 3D eyelids tracking from semantic edges

Abstract

State-of-the-art real-time face tracking systems still lack the ability to realistically portray subtle details of various aspects of the face, particularly the region surrounding the eyes. To improve this situation, we propose a technique to reconstruct the 3D shape and motion of eyelids in real time. By combining these results with the full facial expression and gaze direction, our system generates complete face tracking sequences with more detailed eye regions than existing solutions in real-time. To achieve this goal, we propose a generative eyelid model which decomposes eyelid variation into two low-dimensional linear spaces which efficiently represent the shape and motion of eyelids. Then, we modify a holistically-nested DNN model to jointly perform semantic eyelid edge detection and identification on images. Next, we correspond vertices of the eyelid model to 2D image edges, and employ polynomial curve fitting and a search scheme to handle incorrect and partial edge detections. Finally, we use the correspondences in a 3D-to-2D edge fitting scheme to reconstruct eyelid shape and pose. By integrating our fast fitting method into a face tracking system, the estimated eyelid results are seamlessly fused with the face and eyeball results in real time. Experiments show that our technique applies to different human races, eyelid shapes, and eyelid motions, and is robust to changes in head pose, expression and gaze direction.