Recovering frontal-pose image from a single profile image

In appearance based face recognition, lip reading, etc., eigen face and eigen lip are used for recognition. The pose changes of the human head in a video sequence often cause errors in the eigen space comparison stage, because the frontal-pose assumption has been violated. We propose a new method to compensate the pose changes by exploiting the general symmetry of human face. From the imaging geometry we show that a frontal pose can be recovered from only one profile view. The resulting pose compensation method has the following advantages: (1) it only requires one profile image; (2) it does not need any 3D model; (3) it does not need accurate feature detection. Experimental results in the context of lip images are given to show the effectiveness of our method.