Fast 3D face recognition based on normal map

• Published in: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2005 Vol. 2; pp. II - 946
• Main Authors: Abate, A.F., Nappi, M., Ricciardi, S., Sabatino, G.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2005
• Subjects: 3D face recognition; Biometrics; biometry; Color; Face recognition; Facial features; Feature extraction; Geometry; normal map; Pixel; Principal component analysis; Robustness; Shape
• DOI: 10.1109/ICIP.2005.1530213
• ISBN: 9780780391345; 0780391349
• ISSN: 1522-4880

This paper presents a 3D face recognition method aimed to biometric applications. The proposed method compares any two faces represented as 3D polygonal surfaces through their corresponding normal map, a bidimensional array which stores local curvature (mesh normals) as the pixel's RGB components of a color image. The recognition approach, based on the computation of a difference map resulting from the comparison of normal maps, is simple yet fast and accurate. A weighting mask, automatically generated for each subject using a set of expression variations, improves the robustness to a broad range of facial expressions. First results show the effectiveness of the method on a database of 3D faces featuring different genders, ages and expressions.