Morphable

Morphable is an adjective describing something that can be morphologically changed or deformed. In everyday use, it refers to objects or models that can change shape, form, or structure, often through controlled or parameterized transformations. The term combines morph, meaning shape, with the suffix -able, reflecting the possibility of shape manipulation.

In computer graphics and computer vision, morphable models are a primary usage. A 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) is a parametric representation that captures a family of shapes and textures by a set of basis components. The concept was popularized by Blanz and Vetter in 1999 in their work on the synthesis of 3D faces. A 3DMM is built from 3D scans and uses statistical techniques such as principal component analysis to produce low-dimensional shape and texture spaces. The model can be fit to images to reconstruct a 3D face, or used to interpolate or morph between identities and expressions.

Beyond faces, morphable models can be applied to other deformable objects in graphics and vision. Applications include facial reconstruction, recognition, animation, avatar creation, and synthetic data generation for machine learning. Limitations include dependence on representative training data, difficulty extending to non-human or highly diverse shapes, susceptibility to biases in the data, and computational cost in fitting or rendering.