Modeling hair from an RGB-D camera

Creating realistic 3D hairs that closely match the real-world inputs remains challenging. With the increasing popularity of lightweight depth cameras featured in devices such as iPhone X, Intel RealSense and DJI drones, depth cues can be very helpful in consumer applications, for example, the Animated Emoji. In this paper, we introduce a fully automatic, data-driven approach to model the hair geometry and compute a complete strand-level 3D hair model that closely resembles the input from a single RGB-D camera. Our method heavily exploits the geometric cues contained in the depth channel and leverages exemplars in a 3D hair database for high-fidelity hair synthesis. The core of our method is a local-similarity based search and synthesis algorithm that simultaneously reasons about the hair geometry, strands connectivity, strand orientation, and hair structural plausibility. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method using a variety of complex hairstyles and compare our method with prior arts.