Component-based registration with curvature descriptors for expression insensitive 3d face recognition

Deformations caused by facial expression variations complicate the task of 3D face registration which is vital for successful 3D face recognition systems. In this work, we propose to use a hierarchical component-based face registration technique capable of handling the difficulties caused by non-rigid nature of faces. Local components independently registered by the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm provides a fast registration with the use of a generic face model and does not suffer from non-rigidity of human facial surface. Invariance of the proposed approach is further increased by utilizing curvature-based 3D surface descriptors. Identification experiments conducted on the multi-expression Bosphorus database reveal that the accuracy of the classical ICP-based approach can be significantly increased under extreme expression variations.