Efficient 3D face recognition handling facial expression and hair occlusion

This paper presents an efficient 3D face recognition method to handle facial expression and hair occlusion. The proposed method uses facial curves to form a rejection classifier and produce a facial deformation mapping and then adaptively selects regions for matching. When a new 3D face with an arbitrary pose and expression is queried, the pose is normalized based on the automatically detected nose tip and the principal component analysis (PCA) follows. Then, the facial curve in the nose region is extracted and used to form the rejection classifier which quickly eliminates dissimilar faces in the gallery for efficient recognition. Next, six facial regions which cover the face are segmented and curves in these regions are used to map facial deformation. Regions used for matching are automatically selected based on the deformation mapping. In the end, results of all the matching engines are fused by weighted sum rule. The approach is applied on the FRGC v2.0 dataset and a verification rate of 96.0% for ROC III is achieved as a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.1%. In the identification scenario, a rank-one accuracy of 97.8% is achieved.

► An efficient 3D face preprocessing method is used.
► The partial central profile is used to produce a rejection classifier.
► An adaptive region selection scheme is proposed.