Vision Tomography: Towards Portable 3D Bidirectional Face-Skull Inference from Visual Data

Zidu Wang, Meng Xu, Miao Xu, Hengyuan Ma, Jiankuo Zhao +3

Traditional computed tomography (CT) can capture paired 3D face and skull geometry, but it remains costly, fixed in location, and exposes patients to radiation. For applications such as remote diagnostics, digital healthcare, forensic identification, missing-person investigation, and archaeological analysis, there is an urgent need for a portable, safe, and accessible solution to capture 3D skull geometry. In this work, we introduce Vision Tomography (VT), a concept and framework capable of reconstructing paired 3D face-skull geometry from various visual modalities, and also enabling joint manipulation of 3D facial and skull geometry. To achieve this, we first construct a dataset of over 200 samples, where each case includes a CT-based skull, a CT-based face, and a high-fidelity textured face scan. Secondly, we propose a novel dense ray matching registration method that ensures topological consistency across face, skull, and their tissue correspondences. Building on this registration, we introduce the 3D Bidirectional Face-Skull Morphable Model (BFSM) as the foundation of Vision Tomography, which enables shape inference between the face and skull through a shared coefficient…