2D face recognition based on supervised subspace learning from 3D models

One of the main challenges in face recognition is represented by pose and illumination variations that drastically affect the recognition performance, as confirmed by the results of recent face recognition large-scale evaluations. This paper presents a new technique for face recognition, based on the joint use of 3D models and 2D images, specifically conceived to be robust with respect to pose and illumination changes. A 3D model of each user is exploited in the training stage (i.e. enrollment) to generate a large number of 2D images representing virtual views of the face with varying pose and illumination. Such images are then used to learn in a supervised manner a set of subspaces constituting the user's template. Recognition occurs by matching 2D images with the templates and no 3D information (neither images nor face models) is required. The experiments carried out confirm the efficacy of the proposed technique.     

基于三维数据与MMSV特征的二维人脸识别*

针对二维人脸识别对姿态与光照变化较为敏感的问题,提出了一种基于三维数据与混合多尺度奇异值特征MMSV(mixture of multi-scale singular value,MMSV)的二维人脸识别方法。在训练阶段,利用三维人脸数据与光照模型获取大量具有不同姿态和光照条件的二维虚拟图像,为构造完备的特征模板奠定基础;同时,通过子集划分有效地缓解了人脸特征提取过程中的非线性问题;最后对人脸图像进行MMSV特征提取,从而对人脸的全局与局部特征进行融合。在识别阶段,通过计算MMSV特征子空间距离完成分类识别。实验证明,提取到的MMSV特征包含有更多的鉴别信息,对姿态和光照变化具有理想的鲁棒性。该方法在WHU-3D数据库上取得了约98.4%的识别率。     

Automatic 3D face recognition from depth and intensity Gabor features

As is well known, traditional 2D face recognition based on optical (intensity or color) images faces many challenges, such as illumination, expression, and pose variation. In fact, the human face generates not only 2D texture information but also 3D shape information. In this paper, we investigate what contributions depth and intensity information makes to face recognition when expression and pose variations are taken into account, and we propose a novel system for combining depth and intensity information to improve face recognition systems. In our system, local features described by Gabor wavelets are extracted from depth and intensity images, which are obtained from 3D data after fine alignment. Then a novel hierarchical selecting scheme embedded in linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and AdaBoost learning is proposed to select the most effective and most robust features and to construct a strong classifier. Experiments are performed on the CASIA 3D face database and the FRGC V2.0 database, two data sets with complex variations, including expressions, poses and long time lapses between two scans. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method. In our system, all processes are performed automatically, thus providing a prototype of automatic face recognition combining depth and intensity information.     

三维人脸识别研究综述

近二十多年来,虽然基于图像的人脸识别已取得很大进展,并可在约束环境下获得很好的识别性能,但仍受光照、姿态、表情等变化的影响很大,其本质原因在于图像是三维物体在二维空间的简约投影.因此,利用脸部曲面的显式三维表达进行人脸识别正成为近几年学术界的研究热点.文中分析了三维人脸识别的产生动机、概念与基本过程;根据特征形式,将三维人脸识别算法分为基于空域直接匹配、基于局部特征匹配、基于整体特征匹配三大类进行综述;对二维和三维的双模态融合方法进行分类阐述;列出了部分代表性的三维人脸数据库;对部分方法进行实验比较,并分析了方法有效性的原因;总结了目前三维人脸识别技术的优势与困难,并探讨了未来的研究趋势.     

自适应三维形变模型结合流形分析的人脸识别方法

为了在人脸姿态和表情归一化后减少人脸外观的信息损失,提出自适应三维形变模型(3DMM)结合流形分析的人脸识别方法。首先,描述人脸姿态变换引起的2D和3D坐标的不对应性,提出自适应3DMM拟合方法;然后,通过三维变换来保留尽可能多的身份信息,将整个图像网格化映射成3D对象,姿态和表情的归一化保证了变换的稳定;最后,利用多流形判别分析计算流形与流形之间的距离,并利用最近邻分类器完成识别。在Multi-PIE,LFW以及自己采集的数据库上的实验验证了所提方法的有效性,在3个数据库上的识别率分别高达99.8%,95.25%,98.62%。所提方法显著改善了人脸识别性能,在约束和无约束环境下均优于其他几种较新的识别方法。     

基于少量特征点的多模态人脸识别

针对二维人脸识别对姿态和光照变化较为敏感的问题,提出了一种基于少量特征点的多模态人脸识别方法。在训练阶段,对三维人脸数据进行二次处理和数据挖掘,为建立完备的特征模板奠定了基础;提出了一种简洁高效的样本聚类方法,克服了特征提取过程中的非线性问题;通过局部特征分析(Local Feature Analysis,LFA)实现了特征点"局部"与"全局"信息的融合。实验证明该方法在具有较高执行效率的同时,对人脸图像的姿态和光照变化具有理想的鲁棒性,在WHU-3D小规模人脸数据库上取得了98.06%的识别率。     

Matching 2.5D face scans to 3D models

The performance of face recognition systems that use two-dimensional images depends on factors such as lighting and subject's pose. We are developing a face recognition system that utilizes three-dimensional shape information to make the system more robust to arbitrary pose and lighting. For each subject, a 3D face model is constructed by integrating several 2.5D face scans which are captured from different views. 2.5D is a simplified 3D (x,y,z) surface representation that contains at most one depth value (z direction) for every point in the (x, y) plane. Two different modalities provided by the facial scan, namely, shape and texture, are utilized and integrated for face matching. The recognition engine consists of two components, surface matching and appearance-based matching. The surface matching component is based on a modified iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The candidate list from the gallery used for appearance matching is dynamically generated based on the output of the surface matching component, which reduces the complexity of the appearance-based matching stage. Three-dimensional models in the gallery are used to synthesize new appearance samples with pose and illumination variations and the synthesized face images are used in discriminant subspace analysis. The weighted sum rule is applied to combine the scores given by the two matching components. Experimental results are given for matching a database of 200 3D face models with 598 2.5D independent test scans acquired under different pose and some lighting and expression changes. These results show the feasibility of the proposed matching scheme.     

Face recognition based on 2D images under illumination and pose variations

We propose a novel 2D image-based approach that can simultaneously handle illumination and pose variations to enhance face recognition rate. It is much simpler, requires much less computational effort than the methods based on 3D models, and provides a comparable or better recognition rate.     

Illumination compensation and normalization for robust face recognition using discrete cosine transform in logarithm domain.

This paper presents a novel illumination normalization approach for face recognition under varying lighting conditions. In the proposed approach, a discrete cosine transform (DCT) is employed to compensate for illumination variations in the logarithm domain. Since illumination variations mainly lie in the low-frequency band, an appropriate number of DCT coefficients are truncated to minimize variations under different lighting conditions. Experimental results on the Yale B database and CMU PIE database show that the proposed approach improves the performance significantly for the face images with large illumination variations. Moreover, the advantage of our approach is that it does not require any modeling steps and can be easily implemented in a real-time face recognition system.     

基于DCT和线性回归的人脸识别*

由于人脸图像常常因光照、姿态、表情变化及遮挡等因素的影响而具有非线性结构,在空间域直接使用线性方法就有其局限性。为此,提出了一种基于离散余弦变换和线性回归分类的人脸识别方法:通过离散余弦变换获取人脸图像的变换域特征,以减小光照、姿态变化等影响,然后再利用快速有效的线性回归方法得到识别结果。通过在几个常用人脸数据库上的测试结果表明,该方法在满足实时性的同时,能有效地增强面对这些问题的鲁棒性。     

Homomorphic filtering based illumination normalization method for face recognition

The appearance of a face image is severely affected by illumination conditions that will hinder the automatic face recognition process. To recognize faces under varying lighting conditions, a homomorphic filtering-based illumination normalization method is proposed in this paper. In this work, the effect of illumination is effectively reduced by a modified implementation of homomorphic filtering whose key component is a Difference of Gaussian (DoG) filter, and the contrast is enhanced by histogram equalization. The resulted face image is not only reduced illumination effect but also preserved edges and details that will facilitate the further face recognition task. Among others, our method has the following advantages: (1) neither does it need any prior information of 3D shape or light sources, nor many training samples thus can be directly applied to single training image per person condition; and (2) it is simple and computationally fast because there are mature and fast algorithms for the Fourier transform used in homomorphic filter. The Eigenfaces method is chosen to recognize the normalized face images. Experimental results on the Yale face database B and the CMU PIE face database demonstrate the significant performance improvement of the proposed method in the face recognition system for the face images with large illumination variations.     

融合多种几何特征的三维人脸识别算法

由于对光照、姿态变化的不敏感, 三维人脸识别算法已经受到人们的极大关注, 其中三维人脸特征的表示、获取以及多种表示特征的有效融合仍然是三维人脸识别的核心问题. 本文提出一种三维人脸识别方法, 该方法针对归一化的三维人脸数据, 选取人脸的曲面特征和描述人脸特征相互关系矩阵的主分量特征作为人脸表示特征, 给出了各特征的提取方法及同类特征的相似性度量, 进而提出了一种对各类特征进行加权融合的方法, 即通过分析不同特征的分类识别能力, 根据Fisher的线性判别准则, 以类内和类间特征相似度的均值差与类内和类间的散度平方和之比的大小作为该类特征权重, 在决策层为不同的特征赋予不同的权重. 最后, 基于公开发布的BJUT-3D三维人脸数据库进行了识别性能实验. 实验结果证明, 本文的特征融合方法比一般的加权策略有更好的识别性能．     

基于人脸标准化的纹理和光照保持3D人脸重构

现有人脸纹理重建方法对于人脸的皱纹、胡须、瞳孔颜色等重建效果往往不够细致.为了解决此问题,文中提出基于人脸标准化的纹理和光照保持3D人脸重构.首先对2D人脸图像标准化,使用光照信息和对称纹理重构人脸自遮挡区域的纹理.然后依据2D-3D点对应关系从标准化的2D人脸图像获取相应的3D人脸纹理,结合人脸形状重构和纹理信息,得到最终的3D人脸重构结果.实验表明文中方法有效保留原始2D图像的纹理和光照信息,重构的人脸更自然,具有更丰富的人脸细节.     

Robust Hausdorff distance measure for face recognition

Face is considered to be one of the biometrics in automatic person identification. The non-intrusive nature of face recognition makes it an attractive choice. For face recognition system to be practical, it should be robust to variations in illumination, pose and expression as humans recognize faces irrespective of all these variations. In this paper, an attempt to address these issues is made using a new Hausdorff distance-based measure. The proposed measure represent the gray values of pixels in face images as vectors giving the neighborhood intensity distribution of the pixels. The transformation is expected to be less sensitive to illumination variations besides preserving the appearance of face embedded in the original gray image. While the existing Hausdorff distance-based measures are defined between the binary edge images of faces which contains primarily structural information, the proposed measure gives the dissimilarity between the appearance of faces. An efficient method to compute the proposed measure is presented. The performance of the method on bench mark face databases shows that it is robust to considerable variations in pose, expression and illumination. Comparison with some of the existing Hausdorff distance-based methods shows that the proposed method performs better in many cases.     

2D face fitting-assisted 3D face reconstruction for pose-robust face recognition

Recent face recognition algorithm can achieve high accuracy when the tested face samples are frontal. However, when the face pose changes largely, the performance of existing methods drop drastically. Efforts on pose-robust face recognition are highly desirable, especially when each face class has only one frontal training sample. In this study, we propose a 2D face fitting-assisted 3D face reconstruction algorithm that aims at recognizing faces of different poses when each face class has only one frontal training sample. For each frontal training sample, a 3D face is reconstructed by optimizing the parameters of 3D morphable model (3DMM). By rotating the reconstructed 3D face to different views, pose virtual face images are generated to enlarge the training set of face recognition. Different from the conventional 3D face reconstruction methods, the proposed algorithm utilizes automatic 2D face fitting to assist 3D face reconstruction. We automatically locate 88 sparse points of the frontal face by 2D face-fitting algorithm. Such 2D face-fitting algorithm is so-called Random Forest Embedded Active Shape Model, which embeds random forest learning into the framework of Active Shape Model. Results of 2D face fitting are added to the 3D face reconstruction objective function as shape constraints. The optimization objective energy function takes not only image intensity, but also 2D fitting results into account. Shape and texture parameters of 3DMM are thus estimated by fitting the 3DMM to the 2D frontal face sample, which is a non-linear optimization problem. We experiment the proposed method on the publicly available CMUPIE database, which includes faces viewed from 11 different poses, and the results show that the proposed method is effective and the face recognition results toward pose variants are promising.     

Efficient 3D reconstruction for face recognition

Face recognition with variant pose, illumination and expression (PIE) is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an analysis-by-synthesis framework for face recognition with variant PIE. First, an efficient two-dimensional (2D)-to-three-dimensional (3D) integrated face reconstruction approach is introduced to reconstruct a personalized 3D face model from a single frontal face image with neutral expression and normal illumination. Then, realistic virtual faces with different PIE are synthesized based on the personalized 3D face to characterize the face subspace. Finally, face recognition is conducted based on these representative virtual faces. Compared with other related work, this framework has following advantages: (1) only one single frontal face is required for face recognition, which avoids the burdensome enrollment work; (2) the synthesized face samples provide the capability to conduct recognition under difficult conditions like complex PIE; and (3) compared with other 3D reconstruction approaches, our proposed 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is fully automatic and more efficient. The extensive experimental results show that the synthesized virtual faces significantly improve the accuracy of face recognition with changing PIE.     

Gray Hausdorff distance measure for comparing face images

Human face recognition is considered to be one of the toughest problems in the domain of pattern recognition. The variations in face images due to differing expression, pose and illumination are some of the key issues to be addressed in developing a face recognition system. In this paper, a new measure called gray Hausdorff distance (denoted by H/sub pg/) is proposed to compare the gray images of faces directly. An efficient algorithm for computation of the new measure is presented. The computation time is linear in the size of the image. The performance of this measure is evaluated on benchmark face databases. The face recognition system based on the new measure is found to be robust to pose and expression variations, as well as to slight variation in illumination. Comparison studies show that the proposed measure performs better than the existing ones in most cases.     

隐马尔可夫后处理模型在视频人脸识别中的应用

现有的多数人脸识别系统都专注于如何提高人脸识别算法的性能,但缺乏一种对数据源(人脸样本)进行分析和评估的机制。针对此问题,提出了一种建立在数据源分析基础上对典型人脸识别算法进行后处理的方法。为了揭示现有典型识别算法的识别性能在无约束环境下的鲁棒性,通过建立Lambertian反射模型和3D人脸模型,对特征脸算法的识别性能随数据源的变化(人脸姿态和光照改变)而变化的情况进行了分析评估。针对“数据源灾难”问题,提出了一种基于隐马尔可夫模型（HMM）的后处理解决方法,该方法通过利用视频序列图像的连续性和对训练人脸库的统计分析来提高判别分析方法对无约束环境的鲁棒性。实验结果表明,该方法可以有效地提高识别算法对“数据源灾难”的鲁棒性,提高识别率。     

Face recognition based on Kinect

In this paper, we present a new algorithm that utilizes low-quality red, green, blue and depth (RGB-D) data from the Kinect sensor for face recognition under challenging conditions. This algorithm extracts multiple features and fuses them at the feature level. A Finer Feature Fusion technique is developed that removes redundant information and retains only the meaningful features for possible maximum class separability. We also introduce a new 3D face database acquired with the Kinect sensor which has released to the research community. This database contains over 5,000 facial images (RGB-D) of 52 individuals under varying pose, expression, illumination and occlusions. Under the first three variations and using only the noisy depth data, the proposed algorithm can achieve 72.5 % recognition rate which is significantly higher than the 41.9 % achieved by the baseline LDA method. Combined with the texture information, 91.3 % recognition rate has achieved under illumination, pose and expression variations. These results suggest the feasibility of low-cost 3D sensors for real-time face recognition.     

3D通用人脸模型的自适应算法及应用

利用3D人脸建模的方法进行人脸识别有效地克服了2D人脸识别系统中识别率易受光照、姿态、表情影响的缺陷。文章采用一种依据人脸图像对3D通用人脸模型进行自适应调整的有效算法,构造出特定的人脸模型并运用于人脸识别中。通过比较从人脸图像中估算出的特征点与通用人脸模型在图像平面上的投影点之间的关系,对3D通用人脸模型进行全局和局部调整,以适应人脸中眼、口、鼻的个性化特征。最后以一个实例说明了此算法的应用。