Model-Based Teeth Reconstruction

In this paper, we, therefore, present the first approach for non-invasive reconstruction of an entire person-specific tooth row from just a sparse set of photographs of the mouth region.

In recent years, sophisticated image-based reconstruction methods for the human face have been developed. These methods capture highly detailed static and dynamic geometry of the whole face, or specific models of face regions, such as hair, eyes or eye lids. Unfortunately, image-based methods to capture the mouth cavity in general, and the teeth, in particular, have received very little attention. The accurate rendering of teeth, however, is crucial for the realistic display of facial expressions, and currently, high quality face animations resort to tooth row models created by tedious manual work. In dentistry, special intra-oral scanners for teeth were developed, but they are invasive, expensive, cumbersome to use, and not readily available. In this paper, we, therefore, present the first approach for non-invasive reconstruction of an entire person-specific tooth row from just a sparse set of photographs of the mouth region. The basis of our approach is a new parametric tooth row prior learned from high quality dental scans. A new model-based reconstruction approach fits teeth to the photographs such that visible teeth are accurately matched and occluded teeth plausibly synthesized. Our approach seamlessly integrates into photogrammetric multi-camera reconstruction setups for entire faces, but also enables high quality teeth modeling from normal uncalibrated photographs and even short videos captured with a mobile phone.