During last Siggraph, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany showed a software they use to reconstruct human faces over skulls found by the police. New Scientist published "Animation lets murder victims have final say" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves."
In "Skulls gain virtual faces," Technology Research News gives additional details. So how does this work?
There are two manual reconstruction methods. The anatomical method builds layers of muscles, glands and cartilage over the skull, then adds a skin layer. The second, faster method uses a set of average tissue thickness measurements to build up a face. The first method takes hundreds of hours, requires in-depth anatomical knowledge, and is more often used to reconstruct fossil faces. Where statistical data about a population -- like modern humans -- exists, the second method is more often used.
The researchers' software allows users to attach markers, or landmarks, to a three-dimensional skull model generated from a laser scan of a skull. The landmarks are correlated with statistical tissue depth measurements in order to provide reference points for the software to generate muscles and skin for the model.
Here is an illustration of a face reconstruction process (Credit: Max Planck Institute).
Obviously, the computerized modeling process is much faster than the manual one, allowing anthropologists and forensic artists to make alternate models.
The method could also be used to reconstruct long-extinct animal species, said Kolja Kähler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
For more information, you can check previous works done by these researchers. You also can download their paper, "Reanimating the Dead: Reconstruction of Expressive Faces from Skull Data," in PDF format (6.9 MB).
Sources: Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News, August 13-20, 2003; Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist, August 4, 2003
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