Three-dimensional model based face recognition

The performance of face recognition systems that use two-dimensional (2D) images is dependent on consistent conditions such as lighting, pose and facial expression. We are developing a multi-view face recognition system that utilizes three-dimensional (3D) information about the face to make the system more robust to these variations. This work describes a procedure for constructing a database of 3D face models and matching this database to 2.5D face scans which are captured from different views, using coordinate system invariant properties of the facial surface. 2.5D is a simplified 3D (x, y, z) surface representation that contains at most one depth value (z direction) for every point in the (x, y) plane. A robust similarity metric is defined for matching, based on an iterative closest point (ICP) registration process. Results are given for matching a database of 18 3D face models with 113 2.5D face scans.