3D face recognition using topographic high-order derivatives

This paper presents a novel feature, Topographic High-order Derivatives (THD) for 3D face recognition. THD is based on the high-order micro-pattern information extracted from face topography maps. Face topography maps are partitioned into polar sectors, and THDs are computed using directional highorder derivatives within the sectors. Local features are extracted by encoding directional high-order derivatives within polar neighborhoods. To evaluate the proposed method, we use Bosphorus and FRGC 3D face databases which include pose and expression changes. The performance of the proposed method is higher compared to the state-of-the-art benchmark approaches in 3D face recognition.