From 3D Point Clouds to Pose-Normalised Depth Maps

We consider the problem of generating either pairwise-aligned or pose-normalised depth maps from noisy 3D point clouds in a relatively unrestricted poses. Our system is deployed in a 3D face alignment application and consists of the following four stages: (i) data filtering, (ii) nose tip identification and sub-vertex localisation, (iii) computation of the (relative) face orientation, (iv) generation of either a pose aligned or a pose normalised depth map. We generate an implicit radial basis function (RBF) model of the facial surface and this is employed within all four stages of the process. For example, in stage (ii), construction of novel invariant features is based on sampling this RBF over a set of concentric spheres to give a spherically-sampled RBF (SSR) shape histogram. In stage (iii), a second novel descriptor, called an isoradius contour curvature signal, is defined, which allows rotational alignment to be determined using a simple process of 1D correlation. We test our system on both the University of York (UoY) 3D face dataset and the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 3D data. For the more challenging UoY data, our SSR descriptors significantly outperform three variants of spin images, successfully identifying nose vertices at a rate of 99.6%. Nose localisation performance on the higher quality FRGC data, which has only small pose variations, is 99.9%. Our best system successfully normalises the pose of 3D faces at rates of 99.1% (UoY data) and 99.6% (FRGC data)

A Novel Approach to Face Recognition using Image Segmentation based on SPCA-KNN Method

In this paper we propose a novel method for face recognition using hybrid SPCA-KNN (SIFT-PCA-KNN) approach. The proposed method consists of three parts. The first part is based on preprocessing face images using Graph Based algorithm and SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) descriptor. Graph Based topology is used for matching two face images. In the second part eigen values and eigen vectors are extracted from each input face images. The goal is to extract the important information from the face data, to represent it as a set of new orthogonal variables called principal components. In the final part a nearest neighbor classifier is designed for classifying the face images based on the SPCA-KNN algorithm. The algorithm has been tested on 100 different subjects (15 images for each class). The experimental result shows that the proposed method has a positive effect on overall face recognition performance and outperforms other examined methods