The chinese face: A 3D anthropometric analysis

Traditional facial anthropometry has a long history yet few studies have been conducted using the latest 3D scanning technology. The majority of these facial studies have focused on Caucasian populations. The recent SizeChina survey has collected high resolution 3D data from over 2000 adult Chinese subjects. The 3D facial data of 772 females from the SizeChina database were analyzed in this study. This data was pre-processed to eliminate scan noise, fill holes caused by shadow effect and aligned to a common plane. Thirty one facial landmarks were used for statistical analysis and to create a 3D anthropometric face model. Simple statistics results demonstrated that Chinese females in general have wider and shorter faces compared to other cultures. Correlation analysis showed the breadth dimensions are highly correlated and it seems that heavier people have larger bigonial breadth. Results from the principal component analysis on anthropometric face model reveals that major variations of face shapes are related to face breadth, face depth, face length, chin and jaw position. The results of this study have significant implications for the design of facial products for Chinese women.