3D face recognition under varying expressions using an integrated morphable model

Abstract

This thesis introduces a new method to recognize 3D images of faces in a robustmanner. It requires no user intervention and applies to the most general type offaces obtained through stereo reconstruction. We describe a novel approach, usinga??Integrated Morphable Modela?? (IMM), which improves on the a??morphable modela??framework to recognize faces under varying expressions.IMMs are created using a symmetric matching scheme for computing correspondencesbetween example faces, which yields more accurate results than earlieralgorithms. Submodels are computed for each person in the database and then mergedto form a IMM that takes into account both intra-personnal and extra-personnalvariations in our database. Recognition is performed by morphing the model toan arbitrary input face and classifying the input using the morph parameters.We present experimental results showing good recognition rates, and confirmingthe validity of our approach.