A novel two-pathway encoder-decoder network for 3d face reconstruction

3D Morphable Model (3DMM) is a statistical tool widely employed in reconstructing 3D face shape. Existing methods are aimed at predicting 3DMM shape parameters with a single encoder but suffer from unclear distinction of different attributes. To address this problem, Two-Pathway Encoder-Decoder Network (2PEDN) is proposed to regress the identity and expression components via global and local pathways. Specifically, each 2D face image is cropped into global face and local details as the inputs for the corresponding pathways. 2PEDN is trained to predict 3D face shape components with two sets of loss functions designed to supervise 3D face reconstruction error and face identification error. To reduce the conflict between abundant facial details and saving computer storage space, a magnitudes converter is devised. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several 3D face recontruction methods.