The Prototype Head Model (now defunct)

Nick Pears, University of York, UK

Christian Duncan, Rachel Armstrong, Alder Hey Craniofacial Unit, Liverpool, UK

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The Liverpool-York Head Model (LYHM) is an extension of our early prototype head models built in 2015 and published in our arXiv paper (listed below). These included both a cranial profile model which follows the contour of local sagittal symmetry and a full 3D surface model of the face and cranium.

Face and cranium landmarking

In our first models we used 3D facial landmarking, using supervised machine learning, to learn the local shapes of 14 facial landmarks. The image below shows an auto-landmarked 3D full head scan, with ellipse fitted to the cranial shape within the symmetry plane. Cranial pseudo-landmarks are also shown.

The video below shows a cranium profile model generated from 100 adult males (without beards) in the Headspace dataset. The model was constructed by aligning profiles such that the centre of the cranium was fixed (green cross at origin) as was the angle between the cranium centre and the nasion (-10 degrees). The fixed cyan trace shows the mean across the 100 subject sample and the video animates the first 5 main principal components of form variation (the profiles are not scale normalised) across +-3 standard deviations. The trace changes colour as it moves from one principal component to the next.

The video below shows a full head model generated from the same 100 adult males as the above profile model in the Headspace dataset. Again, the model was constructed by aligning profiles such that the centre of the cranium was fixed as was the angle between the cranium centre and the nasion (-10 degrees). The video animates the first 5 main principal components of form variation (the raw head meshes are not scale normalised) across +-3 standard deviations.

Publications

  1. Automatic 3D modelling of craniofacial form
      N. E. Pears and C. Duncan
      arXiv, 21st Jan 2016
      [arXiv]

  2. A Morphable Profile Model of the Human Head as an Outcome Tool for Craniosynostosis Surgery
      Christian Duncan, Rachel Armstrong (Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool) and Nick E. Pears
      16th Biennial Congress of the International Society of Craniofacial Surgery (ISCFS), Tokyo Bay, Japan, September 14th - 18th, 2015.
      Poster abstract P74 (page e91) in British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 54 (2016).
      [DOI]

Prototype project sponsors

We thank the funding bodies that have supported this research which include

BACK to Nick Pears' Research Projects page.