3D Face Recognition without Facial Surface Reconstruction

Abstract

Recently, a 3D face recognition approach based on geometric invariant signatures, has been proposed. The key idea of the algorithm is a representation of the facial surface, invariant to isometric deformations, such as those resulting from facial expressions. One of the crucial stages in the construction of the geometric invariants is the measurement of geodesic distances on triangulated surfaces, carried out by fast marching on triangulated domains (FMTD). Proposed here is a method, which uses only the metric tensor of the surface for geodesic distance computation. When combined with photometric stereo used for facial surface acquisition, it allows constructing a bending-invariant representation of the face without reconstructing the 3D surface. Index Terms--face recognition, fast marching, photometric stereo, multidimensional scaling.