Development of a 3D printable facial model construction system

In this paper, we present a novel system that can construct the 3D printable facial models in a short time. To construct such 3D models, the system has a pipeline that consists of six steps - image acquisition, camera calibration, background separation, stereo matching, reconstruction of a facial surface, and adaptation of a reference model. We describe each step in the pipeline in detail. In the stereo matching step, the most important step among all, we use a hierarchical block matching which is favorable to a human face. Our system provides a unified component-based software which handles all the steps in one place in a short time.