# 3D Face Reconstruction From Radar Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02403/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Learning to Regress 3D Face Shape and Expression from an Image without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06817/) (2019)
- [MoFA: Model-based Deep Convolutional Face Autoencoder for Unsupervised Monocular Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10580/) (2017)
- [Morphable Face Models - An Open Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08398/) (2017)
- [Regressing Robust and Discriminative 3D Morphable Models with a very Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04904/) (2016)
- [Unrestricted Facial Geometry Reconstruction Using Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10131/) (2017)
- [ExpNet: Landmark-Free, Deep, 3D Facial Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00542/) (2018)
- [FacePoseNet: Making a Case for Landmark-Free Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07517/) (2017)
- [ImmFusion: Robust mmWave-RGB Fusion for 3D Human Body Reconstruction in All Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01346/) (2022)
- [Robust Model-based Face Reconstruction through Weakly-Supervised Outlier Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09614/) (2021)
- [A Realistic Radar Ray Tracing Simulator for Hand Pose Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15412/) (2023)
- [Radar-Based Recognition of Static Hand Gestures in American Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12800/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The 3D reconstruction of faces gains wide attention in computer vision and is used in many fields of application, for example, animation, virtual reality, and even forensics. This work is motivated by monitoring patients in sleep laboratories. Due to their unique characteristics, sensors from the radar domain have advantages compared to optical sensors, namely penetration of electrically non-conductive materials and independence of light. These advantages of radar signals unlock new applications and require adaptation of 3D reconstruction frameworks. We propose a novel model-based method for 3D reconstruction from radar images. We generate a dataset of synthetic radar images with a physics-based but non-differentiable radar renderer. This dataset is used to train a CNN-based encoder to estimate the parameters of a 3D morphable face model. Whilst the encoder alone already leads to strong reconstructions of synthetic data, we extend our reconstruction in an Analysis-by-Synthesis fashion to a model-based autoencoder. This is enabled by learning the rendering process in the decoder, which acts as an object-specific differentiable radar renderer. Subsequently, the combination of both network parts is trained to minimize both, the loss of the parameters and the loss of the resulting reconstructed radar image. This leads to the additional benefit, that at test time the parameters can be further optimized by finetuning the autoencoder unsupervised on the image loss. We evaluated our framework on generated synthetic face images as well as on real radar images with 3D ground truth of four individuals.