DoC Academic's work on facial CGI featured in national media

by Royston Ingram

02 August 2013

Dr Abhijeet Ghosh's work on CGI skin deep modelling has been featured in New Scientist, The Times, the Daily Mail and other national media.

Detailed facial image showing skin texture

A team of researchers led by Abhijeet Ghosh here in the Department of Computing and Paul Debevec of the University of Southern California have had their work on CGI facial reflectance featured in New Scientist, The Times, the Daily Mail and other national media such as Gizmodo.

The team have developed a process of scanning human faces at such a high level of detail that the reproductions are effectively perfect. No pore goes unnoticed.To achieve this they use a specially developed lighting system and camera, and photograph samples of skin from people's chins, cheeks and foreheads at a resolution of about 10 micrometres, so that each skin cell is spread across roughly three pixels. They then use these images to create a 3D model of skin and apply their light reflection technique to it. The result is CGI skin complete with minute structures like pores and microscopic wrinkles. Finally, they feed the CGI images to an algorithm that extends them to fill in an entire CGI face.

This has many applications particularlly for the game and film industry. Computer-generated characters will no longer look so plastic. The bumpiness of the surface of the skin and light reflecting from it at micron scale will be accurately detailed. To make Avatar, artists had to add blemishes, such as moles or creases, by hand. This vastly increased the man-hours and expense of the film, which was nearly 60 per cent computer-generated and cost more than £150 million to make.

Abhijeet has also worked with the cosmetics firm Avon to see if the scanning facial technique could be used to analyse how skin reacts to make-up. The detail involved in the technology could be used by medics and dermatologists, as well as shoppers wanting to find out how different shades of foundation will suit their skin.