Multi-pose 3D face recognition based on 2D sparse representation

The increasing availability of 3D facial data offers the potential to overcome the difficulties inherent with 2D face recognition, including the sensitivity to illumination conditions and head pose variations. In spite of their rapid development, many 3D face recognition algorithms in the literature still suffer from the intrinsic complexity in representing and processing 3D facial data. In this paper, we propose the intrinsic 3D facial sparse representation (I3DFSR) algorithm for multi-pose 3D face recognition. In this algorithm, each 3D facial surface is first mapped homeomorphically onto a 2D lattice, where the value at each site is the depth of the corresponding vertex on the 3D surface. Each 2D lattice is then interpolated and converted into a 2D facial attribute image. Next, the sparse representation is applied to those attribute images. Finally, the identity of each query face can be obtained by using the corresponding sparse coefficients. The innovation of our approach lies in the strategy of converting irregular 3D facial surfaces into regular 2D attribute images such that 3D face recognition problem can be solved by using the sparse representation of those attribute images. We compare the proposed algorithm to three widely used 3D face recognition algorithms in the GavabDB database, to six state-of-the-art algorithms in the FRGC2.0 database, and to three baseline algorithms in the NPU3D database. Our results show that the proposed I3DFSR algorithm can substantially improve the accuracy and efficiency of multi-pose 3D face recognition.