Nonintrusive 3-D face data acquisition system

This paper describes a nonintrusive three-dimensional (3-D) face data acquisition system consisting of a stereo vision system and an 850 nm near-infrared line laser. Although a two-dimensional (2-D) face recognition system can achieve a reliable recognition rate, its performance can be degraded by illumination and pose variation. To alleviate these factors in 2-D face recognition, 3-D face recognition has received much attention. To develop a reliable 3-D face recognition system, many researchers have also focused on 3-D face data acquisition. Earlier 3-D face acquisition systems use visible patterns as features to obtain accurate 3-D data, which makes anyone who wants to be verified uncomfortable. In this paper, we propose a novel 850 nm infrared line laser pattern which is almost invisible for 3-D face data acquisition. The reconstructed 3-D face data consists of over 20,000 3-D points; these data can be used effectively for 3-D face recognition.