Passive Multimodal 2-D+3-D Face Recognition Using Gabor Features and Landmark Distances

We introduce a novel multimodal framework for face recognition based on local attributes calculated from range and portrait image pairs. Gabor coefficients are computed at automatically detected landmark locations and combined with powerful anthropometric features defined in the form of geodesic and Euclidean distances between pairs of fiducial points. We make the pragmatic assumption that the 2-D and 3-D data is acquired passively (e.g., via stereo ranging) with perfect registration between the portrait data and the range data. Statistical learning approaches are evaluated independently to reduce the dimensionality of the 2-D and 3-D Gabor coefficients and the anthropometric distances. Three parallel face recognizers that result from applying the best performing statistical learning schemes are fused at the match score-level to construct a unified multimodal (2-D+3-D) face recognition system with boosted performance. Performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on a large public database of range and portrait image pairs and found to perform quite well.