Joint Rigid Alignment and Morphable Reconstruction from Partial 3D Face Scans
Organizations: Duke University · Universidad Cat´olica del Uruguay
Abstract
Aligning a partial, real-world 3D face scan to a canonical representation requires solving two coupled problems at once: estimating the rigid pose that brings the scan into a common frame, and completing the facial shape in regions the scan never observed. Existing pipelines typically decouple these steps, running a generic point-cloud registration front end followed by a separate non-rigid fitting or deformation stage. Building on the GeoTransformer superpoint-matching architecture, we propose a single network that predicts both a rigid pose and a shape-complete point cloud in one forward pass: a cross-attention regressor, conditioned on transformer point features and predicted coarse correspondences, maps a partial scan to per-patch coefficients of a 3D morphable face model learned offline from a corpus of 8,000 identities. The resulting morphed template is then used, in the same forward pass, as the target for fine-grained Sinkhorn matching and rigid pose estimation, supervised purely by geometric alignment to ground-truth morphed geometry, so no hand-labeled coefficients are required. Against six classical and learned non-rigid registration baselines on held-out identities, our method leads the strongest ones by 3-4 times on per-vertex error and baselines that collapse the head onto the visible region by more than an order of magnitude, and is simultaneously the most accurate and fastest method on ground-truth-free scans from two independent real-scan datasets, NoW and NPHM. Code will be made publicly available.
Figures & tables
| Component | Value |
|---|---|
| Backbone | voxel 0.025, 4 stages |
| Transformer (train) | 0.16 |
| Coarse targets / correspondences | 128 / 256 |
| Coarse / fine matching radius | 0.05 / 0.1 |
| Sinkhorn iterations | 100 |
| Morphable patches components |
| GT err (mm) | CD (mm) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | Self-Occlusion | Face-Cut | Self-Occlusion | Face-Cut | Time (s) |
| NRICP [ 1 ] | 64.45 | ||||
| CPD [ 11 ] | 39.95 | ||||
| NSFP [ 10 ] | 15.40 | ||||
| GraphSCNet [ 16 ] | 40.60 | ||||
| ClusterReg [ 25 ] | 41.40 | ||||
| Method | CD (mm) | Time (s) |
|---|---|---|
| NRICP [ 1 ] | 31.35 | |
| CPD [ 11 ] | 22.50 | |
| NSFP [ 10 ] | 11.80 | |
| GraphSCNet [ 16 ] | 37.45 | |
| ClusterReg [ 25 ] | 23.05 | |
| OAReg [ 26 ] | 10.90 |
3D Face Reconstruction
3D face reconstruction estimates facial shape and appearance from images or video to create usable models and avatars.
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