Facial landmarks for forensic skull-based 3D face reconstruction: A literature review

Recent Face Analysis advances have focused the attention on studying and formalizing 3D facial shape. Landmarks, i.e. typical points of the face, are perfectly suited to the purpose, as their position on visage shape allows to build up a map of each human being’s appearance. This turns to be extremely useful for a large variety of fields and related applications. In particular, the forensic context is taken into consideration in this study. This work is intended as a survey of current research advances in forensic science involving 3D facial landmarks. In particular, by selecting recent scientific contributions in this field, a literature review is proposed for in-depth analyzing which landmarks are adopted, and how, in this discipline. The main outcome concerns the identification of a leading research branch, which is landmark-based facial reconstruction from skull. The choice of selecting 3D contributions is driven by the idea that the most innovative Face Analysis research trends work on three-dimensional data, such as depth maps and meshes, with three-dimensional software and tools. The third dimension improves the accurateness and is robust to colour and lightning variations.