A Survey of Image-Based Techniques for Hair Modeling

With the tremendous performance increase of today's graphics technologies, visual details of digital humans in games, online virtual worlds, and virtual reality applications are becoming significantly more demanding. Hair is a vital component of a person's identity and can provide strong cues about age, background, and even personality. More and more researchers focus on hair modeling in the fields of computer graphics and virtual reality. Traditional methods are physics-based simulation by setting different parameters. The computation is expensive, and the constructing process is non-intuitive, difficult to control. Conversely, image-based methods have the advantages of fast modeling and high fidelity. This paper surveys the state of the art in the major topics of image-based techniques for hair modeling, including single-view hair modeling, static hair modeling from multiple images, video-based dynamic hair modeling, and the editing and reusing of hair modeling results. We first summarize the single-view approaches, which can be divided into the orientation-field and data-driven-based methods. The static methods from multiple images and dynamic methods are then reviewed in Sections III and IV. In Section V, we also review the editing and reusing of hair modeling results. The future development trends and challenges of image-based methods are proposed in the end.