A method of face recognition using 3D facial surfaces

Face recognition is one of the most rapidly developing areas of image processing and computer vision. In this work, a new method for face recognition and identification using 3D facial surfaces is proposed. The method is invariant to facial expression and pose variations in the scene. The method uses 3D shape data without color or texture information. The method is based on conformal mapping of original facial surfaces onto a Riemannian manifold, followed by comparison of conformal and isometric invariants computed in this manifold. Computer results are presented using known 3D face databases that contain significant amount of expression and pose variations.