Towards 3-dimensional face recognition

This paper describes a system for recognizing human faces from a stereo image pair out of a large database with one image pair per person. The faces are stored as image meshes which contain the position and disparity for 40 feature points extracted from the image pair. Texture information, described by the outputs of a set of Gabor wavelets is stored for each feature point. The Gabor wavelets are also used in the disparity estimation process to resolve a 3-D representation of the face. The recognition is conducted by examining how well the stored meshes can be projected onto the image pair to be tested, using camera calibration data. This is important as recognition is independent of pose, camera geometry, distance from camera and lighting conditions