A robust detection and removal of beard from three dimensional human face

The detection and recognition of human face are a vital step to achieve several objectives, such as intrusion detection, face recognition which require high accuracy. The presence or absence of a beard changes a person´s appearance dramatically and has a huge effect or the ability to detect and to recognize him. This paper introduces a novel approach for the detection of bearded face and removal of beard from three dimensional bearded faces. The proposed method preprocess to extract the informative part of face and to divide the face into five segments in order to locate the lower part of the face. This preprocessing led to detect the presence of the beard in this region by calculating and comparing the standard deviation of coordinate Z of each mouth area. In a second process, we precede a Laplace smoothing operation to remove the beard. As results we found that the low pass filter (Taubin smoothing) turned out to be the most and appropriate operation to remove different styles of beards.