Evaluation of Facial Reconstructive Surgery on Patients with Facial Palsy using Optical Strain

We explore marker-less tracking methods for the purpose ofevaluating the efficacy of facial re-constructive surgery on patients withfacial palsies. After experimenting with several optical flow methods, wechoose an approach that results in less than 2 pixels in tracking error for15 markers tracked on the face. A novel method is presented that utilizesthe non-rigid deformation observed on facial skin tissue to visualize theseverity of facial paralysis. Results are given on a dataset that containsthree videos of an individual recorded using a standard definition cameraboth before and after undergoing facial reconstructive surgery over aperiod of three years.