  Dense surface registration of three-dimensional (3D) human facial images
holds great potential for studies of human trait diversity, disease genetics,
and forensics. Non-rigid registration is particularly useful for establishing
dense anatomical correspondences between faces. Here we describe a novel
non-rigid registration method for fully automatic 3D facial image mapping. This
method comprises two steps: first, seventeen facial landmarks are automatically
annotated, mainly via PCA-based feature recognition following 3D-to-2D data
transformation. Second, an efficient thin-plate spline (TPS) protocol is used
to establish the dense anatomical correspondence between facial images, under
the guidance of the predefined landmarks. We demonstrate that this method is
robust and highly accurate, even for different ethnicities. The average face is
calculated for individuals of Han Chinese and Uyghur origins. While fully
automatic and computationally efficient, this method enables high-throughput
analysis of human facial feature variation.
