3D face recognition

Face recognition has recently received much attention as a biometric security means well accepted by users. 3D face recognition, exploiting the geometry of the facial surface, addresses the two most sensitive aspects of face recognition: viewpoint and illumination changes. This paper presents a 3D face recognition approach based on the geometrical comparison of a set of profiles. These profiles are obtained as parallel planar cuts of the facial surfaces. In a first step, normalised profiles are extracted from each face independently thanks to the intrinsic symmetry of faces. The homologue profiles of test and reference surfaces are then matched two by two. The individual distances of profile pairs are combined into a global distance. The global distance after optimisation is used as criterion to state the similarity of faces. Results are presented for a population of 81 persons of a 3D face database of intermediate quality.