Surface Normals Based Landmarking for 3D Face Recognition Using Photometric Stereo Captures

In recent decades, many 3D data acquisition methods have been developed to provide accurate and cost-effective 3D captures of the human face. An example system, which can accommodate both research and commercial applications, is the Photoface device. Photoface is based on the photometric stereo imaging technique. To improve the recognition performance using Photoface captures, a novel landmarking algorithm is first proposed by thresholding surface normals maps. The development of landmarking algorithms specifically for photometric stereo captures enables region-based feature extraction and fills a gap in the 3D face landmarking literature. Nasal curves and spherical patches are then used respectively for recognition and are evaluated on the 3DE-VISIR database, which contains Photoface captures with expressions. The neutral vs. non-neutral matching results demonstrate high face recognition performance using spherical patches and a KFA classifier, achieving a R1RR of 97.26% when only 24 patches are selected for matching.