Ooooh, this is so cool. I didn’t realize I was seeing projected ‘makeup’ on faces until they showed some lower latency prior work. Once I saw it, I could see occasional misalignment. But, this is just an awesome and fun thing. I can imagine it being just amazing for live theater costuming and story telling.
That said, it looks like the tech currently works at 1-2m range. I’d guess this is because that’s an easy range for a projector to work at and provide high res, in which case there’s no reason you couldn’t get a zoom setup going.
Perhaps some enterprising director of the next Disney theater production will put the money in to get this working reliably on stage.
Check out a lot of DisneyResearchHub's videos on YouTube. They are regularly posting research on object/face tracking and projections.
That said as you mentioned faces are pretty stereotyped. We "solved" face mapping two decades ago with Tim Cootes and Paul Ekman's work. We're able to quickly map rough estimates using traditional haar cascade classifiers and Viola-Jones with AdaBoost. Neural Networks may help, but we have other solutions that also handle the problem with "relative" ease (ignoring lighting, occlusion, etc.)
I don't know if it's SoTa but previously in a joint academic+industrial project I've had very good success with faceboxes for face tracking and then adaptive Wing loss for facial alignment. With c++ and an ONNX runtime, I achieved very fast and accurate results, being robust to lighting and harsh angles.
The artistic possibilities of this are really fascinating. Looking forward to what people come up with! Projection mapping interactive art is always mesmerizing
It seems like they've done two things here - the physical optical apparatus setup and the algorithm.
I'm wondering why the physical alignment is so important. Are camera distortion models and mapping, view projection, etc. just too slow or low quality to run?
I suppose I'll have to take a look at their paper later.
Uh... this is a white paper about projecting an image onto a moving face. Not super imposing, but projecting... with a projector... using light... so what exactly are you worried about with this tech? Or is it just that you're afraid of face tracking in general? And it's not really about this topic specifically?
That said, it looks like the tech currently works at 1-2m range. I’d guess this is because that’s an easy range for a projector to work at and provide high res, in which case there’s no reason you couldn’t get a zoom setup going.
Perhaps some enterprising director of the next Disney theater production will put the money in to get this working reliably on stage.