2D and 3D face recognition using convolutional neural network

Face recognition remains a challenge today as recognition performance is strongly affected by variability such as illumination, expressions and poses. In this work we apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the challenging task of both 2D and 3D face recognition. We constructed two CNN models, namely CNN-1 (two convolutional layers) and CNN-2 (one convolutional layer) for testing on 2D and 3D dataset. A comprehensive parametric study of two CNN models on face recognition is represented in which different combinations of activation function, learning rate and filter size are investigated. We find that CNN-2 has a better accuracy performance on both 2D and 3D face recognition. Our experimental results show that an accuracy of 85.15% was accomplished using CNN-2 on depth images with FRGCv2.0 dataset (4950 images with 557 objectives). An accuracy of 95% was achieved using CNN-2 on 2D raw image with the AT&T dataset (400 images with 40 objectives). The results indicate that the proposed CNN model is capable to handle complex information from facial images in different dimensions. These results provide valuable insights into further application of CNN on 3D face recognition.