Computational Human Nasal Reconstruction Based on Facial Landmarks

Abstract

This research presented a mathematical-based approach to the computational reconstruction of the human nose through images with anthropometric characteristics. The nasal baselines, which were generated from facial aesthetic subunits combined with the facial landmarks, were reconstructed using interpolation and Mesh adaptive direct search algorithms to generate points that would serve as the support for the layer-by-layer reconstruction. The approach is proposed as the basis for nasal reconstruction in aesthetics or forensics rather than focusing on the applications of image processing or deep learning. A mathematical model for the computational reconstruction was built, and then volunteers were the subjects of nasal reconstruction experiments. The validations based on the area errors—which are based on four samples and eight sub-regions with different values depending on the regions C1, C2, and C3 and nasal shapes of the volunteers—were measured to prove the results of the mathematical model. Evaluations have demonstrated that the computer-reconstructed noses fit the original ones in shape and with minimum area errors. This study describes a computational reconstruction based on a mathematical approach directly to facial anthropometric landmarks to reconstruct the nasal shape.