Abstract:
In this study, a fully automatic pose and expression invariant 3D face alignment algorithm is proposed to handle frontal and profile face images which is based on a two pass course to fine alignment strategy. The first pass of the algorithm coarsely aligns the face images to an intrinsic coordinate system (ICS) through a single 3D rotation and the second pass aligns them at fine level using a minimum nose tip-scanner distance (MNSD) approach. For facial recognition, multi-view faces are synthesized to exploit real 3D information and test the efficacy of the proposed system. Due to optimal separating hyper plane (OSH), Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed in multi-view face verification (FV) task. In addition, a multi stage unified classifier based face identification (FI) algorithm is employed which combines results from seven base classifiers, two parallel face recognition algorithms and an exponential rank combiner, all in a hierarchical manner. The performance figures of the proposed methodology are corroborated by extensive experiments performed on four benchmark datasets: GavabDB, Bosphorus, UMB-DB and FRGC v2.0. Results show mark improvement in alignment accuracy and recognition rates. Moreover, a computational complexity analysis has been carried out for the proposed algorithm which reveals its superiority in terms of computational efficiency as well.
Keywords: 3D FR, 3D alignment, profile face, SVM, unified classifier