Three-Dimensional Face Recognition Using Surface Space Combinations

Thomas Heseltine, Nick Pears, Jim Austin

Advanced Computer Architecture Group Department of Computer Science - University of York

www.cs.york.ac.uk/~tomh

tom.heseltine@cs.york.ac.uk

Introduction
Growing interest in biometric authentication National ID cards, Airport security (MRPs), Surveillance. Fingerprint, iris, hand geometry, gait, voice, vein and face. Face recognition offers several advantages over other biometrics

Covert operation.
Human readable media. Public acceptance. Data required is readily available police databases etc.

But

Limitations of 2D Face Recognition

System effectiveness is highly dependant on image capture conditions.
Lighting conditions. Different lighting conditions for enrolment and query. Bright light causing image saturation. Head orientation. 2D feature distances appear to distort. Image quality. CCTV, Web-cams etc. Facial expression. Changes in feature location and shape. Partial occlusion Hats, scarves, glasses etc.

Result:

Face recognition is not as accurate as other biometrics. Error rates that are too high for many applications in mind.
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A Possible Solution 3D Face Recognition

Newly emerging 3D cameras allow subsecond generation of 3D face models
Using 3D face models for recognition potentially provides the following benefits:
Use of geometric depth information rather than colour and texture Invariant to lighting conditions

Ability to rotate face model in 3D space

Invariant to head angle 3D models captured to scale Absolute measurements invariant to camera distance
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3D Face Data
Generated using a stereo vision camera enhanced by light projection. Stored in OBJ file format. Approximately 8000 points on a facial surface. Greyscale texture mapped.

Wire-mesh

Polygons

Texture

5 Lighting

The Fishersurface Method

Developed in previous work
[Heseltine, Pears, Austin. Three-Dimensional Face Recognition: A Fishersurface Approach].

Adaptation of the fisherface method to 3D face data.

[Belhumeur, Hespanha, Kriegman, Eigenfaces vs. Fisherfaces: Face Recognition using class specific linear projection].

Uses PCA + LDA to create a surface space projection matrix

Orientate 3D face models to face directly forwards.

Convert to depth-map representation (60 by 90 pixels). Train on 300 depth maps of 50 different people. Projected depth maps compared using Euclidean or cosine distance metrics.
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Test Database
Little publicly available 3D Face data, so we collect our own 3D face database: Database now consists of over 5000 face models of over 350 people.

Large range of expression, orientation, gender, ethnicity, age.

We take a subset of this database (1770 models) for training and testing. 300 3D models of 50 people for training 1470 3D models of 280 people for testing

Error Rates
Error curves produced for all surface representations.

EER taken as a single comparative value.

A large range of error rates produced.

Surface Space Analysis Using FLD

d

(m
i 1 1 i c i 1

m) 2
2 i

(x m )
x i

Fishers Linear Discriminant calculates the ratio of between-class and within-class scatter, providing an indication of discriminating ability.

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Combining Surface Space Dimensions

Some surface representations perform better than others. However, even the worst representations produce a surface space with some highly discriminatory dimensions. Extract best dimensions from all surface spaces

Incorporate into a single combined surface space

Dividing each element by its within-class standard deviation effectively weights each dimension evenly.
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Test Procedure

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3D Combination Results
Face space dimensions are selected from a wide range of systems and combined to form a single unified 3D face space. Using the cosine metric results in combining more surface space dimensions.

9.3% EER on the blind test set (11.5% single) 8.2% EER on the full test set (11.3% single) 7.2% EER on test set used to calculate dimension combinations (11.6% single)
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Three-Dimensional Face Recognition Using Surface Space Combinations

Questions?
Thomas Heseltine, Nick Pears, Jim Austin
Advanced Computer Architecture Group Department of Computer Science - University of York

www.cs.york.ac.uk/~tomh

tom.heseltine@cs.york.ac.uk