3D Face Compression and Recognition using Spherical Wavelet Parametrization

Abstract

In this research an innovative fully automated 3D face compression and recognition system is presented. Several novelties are introduced to make the system performance robust and efficient. These novelties include: First, an automatic pose correction and normalization process by using curvature analysis for nose tip detection and iterative closest point (ICP) image registration. Second, the use of spherical based wavelet coefficients for efficient representation of the 3D face. The spherical wavelet transformation is used to decompose the face image into multi-resolution sub images characterizing the underlying functions in a local fashion in both spacial and frequency domains. Two representation features based on spherical wavelet parameterization of the face image were proposed for the 3D face compression and recognition. Principle component analysis (PCA) is used to project to a low resolution sub-band. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, experiments were performed on the GAVAB face database. Experimental results show that the spherical wavelet coefficients yield excellent compression capabilities with minimal set of features. Haar wavelet coefficients extracted from the face geometry image was found to generate good recognition results that outperform other methods working on the GAVAB database.