We present a novel 3D face reconstruction technique that leverages sparse photometric stereo (PS) and latest advances on face registration/modeling from a single image. We observe that 3D morphable faces approach provides a reasonable geometry proxy for light position calibration. Specifically, we develop a robust optimization technique that can calibrate per-pixel lighting direction and illumination at a very high precision without assuming uniform surface albedos. Next, we apply semantic

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... ntation on input images and the geometry proxy to refine hairy vs. bare skin regions using tailored filters. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that by using a very small set of images, our technique is able to reconstruct fine geometric details such as wrinkles, eyebrows, whelks, pores, etc, comparable to and sometimes surpassing movie quality productions.