Until now, this has been a computational challenge of “extraordinary difficulty,” the researchers wrote, with obstacles posed by different facial poses, expressions, and variable lighting.

“Typically if you want to reconstruct a face you have to try and use something called 3D morphable models, or shape from shading,” Aaron Jackson, a Ph.D. student who works on deep learning applied to human faces and who is one of the authors of the paper, told Seeker.

This method of 3D facial reconstruction analyzes shadows on the face to come up with a likely structure. It requires multiple images and poses.