# Fitting a 3D Morphable Model to Edges: A Comparison Between Hard and Soft Correspondences

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11312/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05301/) (2021)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [SMIRK: 3D Facial Expressions through Analysis-by-Neural-Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04104/) (2024)
- [Instant Multi-View Head Capture through Learnable Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07437/) (2023)
- [Fast-GANFIT: Generative Adversarial Network for High Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07474/) (2021)
- [TEASER: Token Enhanced Spatial Modeling for Expressions Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10982/) (2025)
- [Topo4D: Topology-Preserving Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity 4D Head Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00440/) (2024)
- [AVFace: Towards Detailed Audio-Visual 4D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13115/) (2023)
- [Sphere Face Model:A 3D Morphable Model with Hypersphere Manifold Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02238/) (2021)
- [BabyNet: Reconstructing 3D faces of babies from uncalibrated photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05908/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Approach for 3D Head Reconstruction: Using Neural Networks and Visual Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13710/) (2021)
- [Topologically Consistent Multi-View Face Inference Using Volumetric Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02948/) (2021)
- [Deep-MDS Framework for Recovering the 3D Shape of 2D Landmarks from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15200/) (2022)
- [Generating Animatable 3D Cartoon Faces from Single Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01468/) (2023)
- [Bringing Diversity from Diffusion Models to Semantic-Guided Face Asset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15259/) (2025)
- [FaceSnap: Real-Time Personalized Lightstage Facial Performance Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31033/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a fully automatic method for fitting a 3D morphable model to single face images in arbitrary pose and lighting. Our approach relies on geometric features (edges and landmarks) and, inspired by the iterated closest point algorithm, is based on computing hard correspondences between model vertices and edge pixels. We demonstrate that this is superior to previous work that uses soft correspondences to form an edge-derived cost surface that is minimised by nonlinear optimisation.