advantage that at the same time is their weakness, they extract all the information from a standard (RGB) 2D photograph of the face. As depicted in Figure \[fig:3dillustration\] a single image does not contain actual 3D information. To overcome this intrinsic limitation different ideas have been proposed and datasets with 3D facial information are becoming more popular [@Zulqarnain2018]. For example, Zafeiriou et al. [@Zafeiriou2013] propose a four-light source photometric stereo (PS). A similar idea is elaborated by Zou et al. [@Zou2005] who propose to use active near-infrared illumination and combine a pair of input images to extract an illumination invariant face representation. Despite the previous mentioned techniques, performing a 3D facial reconstruction is still a challenging and complicated task. Many strategies have been proposed to tackle this problem, including time delay based [@marks1992system], image cue based [@eigen2015predicting; @eigen2014depth; @laina2016deeper; @prados2006shape; @saxena2009make3d], and triangulation based methods [@ayubi2010pulse; @DiMartino2015one; @li2014some; @Rosman2016; @zhang2006high]. Although there has been great recent development, available technology for 3D scanning is still too complicated to be ubiquitously deployed [@di2018one; @hartley2003multiple; @zhang2010recent; @zhang2013handbook]. The proposed solution has two key features that make it, to the best of our knowledge, different from existing alternatives. (a) Because the projected pattern is 