Physics-based revocable face recognition

We present a face reconstruction approach for revocable face matching. The proposed approach generates photometrically valid cancelable face images by following the image formation process. Given a face image, the approach estimates facial albedo followed by a subject-specific key based photometric deformation to generate a cancelable face image. The proposed approach allows for using any available face matcher to perform verification or recognition in the transformed domain, a capability missing from most existing works on cancelable face matching. Experiments are performed to evaluate the performance, privacy and cancelable aspects of the face images reconstructed using the approach. Results obtained are very promising and make a strong case for such backward compatible cancelable face representations that can seamlessly make use of advancements in automatic face recognition research.