3D head tracking and pose-robust 2D texture map-based face recognition using a simple ellipsoid model

A human face provides a variety of different communicative functions such as identification, the perception of emotional expression, and lip-reading. For these reasons, many applications in robotics require tracking and recognizing a human face. A novel face recognition system should be able to deal with various changes in face images, such as pose, illumination, and expression, among which pose variation is the most difficult one to deal with. Therefore, face registration (alignment) is the key of robust face recognition. If we can register face images into frontal views, the recognition task would be much easier. To align a face image into a canonical frontal view, we need to know the pose information of a human head. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel method for modeling a human head as a simple 3D ellipsoid. And also, we present 3D head tracking and pose estimation methods using the proposed ellipsoidal model. After recovering full motion of the head, we can register face images with pose variations into stabilized view images which are suitable for frontal face recognition. By doing so, simple and efficient frontal face recognition can be easily carried out in the stabilized texture map space instead of the original input image space. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach using a simple ellipsoid model, 3D head tracking experiments are carried out on 45 image sequences with ground truth from Boston University, and several face recognition experiments are conducted on our laboratory database and the Yale Face Database B by using subspace-based face recognition methods such as PCA, PCA+LAD, and DCV.