Facial reconstruction is mainly used in two principal branches of science: forensic science and anthropology. Remains of a human skull act as input to reconstruct the most likely corresponding facial appearance of the dead person to enable recognition. Traditional methods rely on manual sculpturing a moldable substance onto the replica of the unknown skull using anatomic clues and reference data. Computer-aided facial reconstruction methods have been previously proposed. Related work uses different techniques for the underlying registration as well as for the subsequent facial reconstruction. Turner in A novel method of automated skull registration for forensic facial approximation introduced a technique for automated skull registration and craniofacial reconstruction based on extracted surfaces from CT data that was applied to a large CT database consisting of individuals.
In this paper, we present a method for automated estimation of a human face given a skull remain. Our proposed method is based on three statistical models. A volumetric tetrahedral skull model encoding the variations of different skulls, a surface head model encoding the head variations, and a dense statistic of facial soft tissue thickness FSTT. All data are automatically derived from computed tomography CT head scans and optical face scans. In order to obtain a proper dense FSTT statistic, we register a skull model to each skull extracted from a CT scan and determine the FSTT value for each vertex of the skull model towards the associated extracted skin surface. The FSTT values at predefined landmarks from our statistic are well in agreement with data from the literature. To recover a face from a skull remain, we first fit our skull model to the given skull.
This includes the muscle groups of the face and the location and tissue depth of each of these muscles. To preserve the original skull of the deceased for any future examination and analysis, facial reconstruction is performed on a cast. Alginate is commonly used to create a mould from the original skull and then plaster or resin is poured into the mould to create an accurate reproduction of the original skull.
This is a brief overview of how forensic 3-D manual craniofacial reproductions are done. While this instructable will show the process of one case from beginning to end, it is not intended to be a proxy for teaching the knowledge and skills required to perform a credible facial reproduction; that takes years of training. Please vote for this project in the Up contest here!