A VISION-BASED 3-DIMENSIONAL CAPTURE SYSTEM FOR MAXILLOFACIAL ASSESSMENT AND SURGICAL PLANNING

We describe a vision-based three-dimensional facial data capture syste m designed for the planning of maxillofacial operations. We describe t he system requirements and outline the methods used to develop a compl ete three-dimensional facial capture system. Our approach is based upo n imaging the face using two stereo-pair sets of cameras. Scale-space- based stereo-matching is then used to recover correspondences between each of the captured stereo-pairs. Photogrammetric routines based on a djustment of bundles are used off-line to calibrate the system by imag ing a single object that references all cameras to the same co-ordinat e frame. This calibration scheme allows us to convert stereo correspon dences to world points for each pair of cameras without the need for a ny subsequent fusion of data. Initial results show that we are able to capture key facial landmarks to within 0.5 mm.