3D Face Recognition using Mapped Depth Images

This paper addresses 3D face recognition from facial shape. Firstly, we present an effective method to automatically extract ROI of facial surface, which mainly depends on automatic detection of facial bilateral symmetry plane and localization of nose tip. Then we build a reference plane through the nose tip for calculating the relative depth values. Considering the non-rigid property of facial surface, the ROI is triangulated and parameterized into an isomorphic 2D planar circle, attempting to preserve the intrinsic geometric properties. At the same time the relative depth values are also mapped. Finally we perform eigenface on the mapped relative depth image. The entire scheme is insensitive to pose variance. The experiment using FRGC database v1.0 obtains the rank-1 identification score of 95%, which outperforms the result of the PCA base-line method by 4%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our algorithm.