For planning, simulation and documentation of interventions in maxillofacial surgery high resolving soft tissue information of the human face in upright position is needed. This information can be gained by holographic methods, which allow a recording of the whole face in an extremely short time period, so that no movement artefacts occur. The hologram is recorded with a single laser pulse of 25 ns duration and stored in photosensitive material. After automated wet-chemical processing, the hologram is optically reconstructed with a cw-laser. During the optical reconstruction, a light field, which is a one-to-one three-dimensional representation of the recorded face, emerges at its original position and is digitized into a set of two-dimensional projections. Digital image processing leads to merging of these projections into a three-dimensional computer model. Besides the topometric information, a high resolving pixel precise texture is also extracted from the holographic reconstruction and used for the texturing of the computer models. The use of mirrors allows the simultaneous recording of three different views of the face with one laser pulse. The three different views of the face can be combined easily, because they are simultaneously recorded. Thus a recording range of approximately 270 degrees is achieved. In addition to the medical application, high resolving and textured computer models of faces are of tremendous importance for facial reconstruction in anthropology, forensic science and archaeology.

Date Published: 13 February 2006
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6081, Multimodal Biomedical Imaging, 60810F (13 February 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.646029

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6081:
Multimodal Biomedical Imaging
Fred S. Azar; Dimitris N. Metaxas, Editor(s)