3D Face Alignment for Japanese Terracotta Figurines (Haniwa)

The Haniwa belong to one kind of terracotta figurines made in ancient Japan, which have been scanned and saved as 3D models composed of point cloud and triangular meshes for archaeology research. In order to align and analyze the face parts of the Haniwa, this paper proposes an ellipsoid-fitting-based segmentation method to extract the nose points, and a hole detection method to locate the contours of eyes and mouth. Our experiments show the proposed methods can be used to achieve the face alignment for the Haniwa with high precision, and make the corresponding face analysis a reality.