Smartphone videos produce highly realistic 3-D face reconstructions

Normally, it takes pricey equipment and expertise to create an accurate 3-D reconstruction of someone's face that's realistic and doesn't look creepy. Now, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have pulled off the feat using video recorded on an ordinary smartphone. Using a smartphone to shoot a continuous video of the front and sides of the face generates a dense cloud of data. A two-step process developed by CMU's Robotics Institute uses that data, with some help from deep learning algorithms, to build a digital reconstruction of the face. The team's experiments show that their method can achieve sub-millimeter accuracy, outperforming other camera-based processes.