Face-GCN: A Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Dynamic Face Recognition

Face recognition has significantly advanced over the past years. However, most of the proposed approaches rely on static RGB frames and on neutral facial expressions. This has two disadvantages. First, important facial shape cues are ignored. Second, facial deformations due to expressions can have an impact in the performance of such a method. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for dynamic 3D face recognition based on facial keypoints. Each dynamic sequence of facial expressions is represented as a spatio-temporal graph, which is constructed using 3D facial landmarks. Each graph node contains local shape and texture features that are extracted from its neighborhood. For the classification of face videos, a Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) is used. Finally, we evaluate our approach on a challenging dynamic 3D facial expression dataset.