An analysis of facial shape and texture for recognition: A large scale evaluation on FRGC ver2.0

Traditional approaches to face recognition have utilized aligned facial images containing both shape and texture information. This paper analyzes the contributions of the individual facial shape and texture components to face recognition. These two components are evaluated independently and we investigate methods to combine the information gained from each of them to enhance face recognition performance. The contributions of this paper are the following: (1) to the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale study of how face recognition is influenced by shape and texture as all of our results are benchmarked against traditional approaches on the challenging NIST FRGC ver2.0 experiment 4 dataset, (2) we empirically show that shape information is reasonably discriminative, (3) we demonstrate significant improvement in performance by registering texture with dense shape information, and finally (4) show that fusing shape and texture information consistently boosts recognition results across different subspace-based algorithms.