Face recognition using principal geodesic analysis and manifold learning

This paper describes how face recognition can be effected using 3D shape information extracted from single 2D image views. We characterise the shape of the field of facial normals using a statistical model based on principal geodesic analysis. The model can be fitted to 2D brightness images of faces to recover a vector of shape parameters. Since it captures variations in a field of surface normals, the dimensionality of the shape vector is twice the number of image pixels. We investigate how to perform face recognition using the output of PGA by applying a number of dimensionality reduction techniques including principal components analysis, locally linear embedding, locality preserving projection and Isomap