3D characteristic facial contours

Since 1970's, many sophisticated face recognition techniques have been developed, and the performance of the existing face recognition systems has been improved constantly. However, two very challenging problems remain: changes in lighting conditions and head poses. Several approaches, mostly based on 3D models with high computational costs, have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using only a small set of characteristic contours extracted from 3D face models. The 3D surface-matching problem is therefore reduced to a contour-matching problem. The contour-matching problem is further simplified into a simple one-dimensional z-distance comparison problem. Our preliminary experiments are performed on a small database containing 20 different face models, including two identical twin brothers. Our preliminary results show a very encouraging performance in both comparison accuracy and computational speed. Promising further research along this direction is discussed.