A Feasibility Study on the Use of Binary Keypoint Descriptors for 3D Face Recognition

Despite the progress made in the area of local image descriptors in recent years, virtually no literature is available on the use of more recent descriptors for the problem of 3D face recognition, such as BRIEF, ORB, BRISK or FREAK, which are binary in nature and, therefore, tend to be faster to compute and match, while requiring significantly less memory for storage than, for example, SIFT or SURF. In this paper, we try to close this gap and present a feasibility study on the use of these descriptors for 3D face recognition. Descriptors are evaluated on the three challenging 3D face image datasets, namely, the FRGC, UMB and CASIA. Our experiments show the binary descriptors ensure slightly lower verification rates than SIFT, comparable to those of the SURF descriptor, while being an order of magnitude faster than SIFT. The results suggest that the use of binary descriptors represents a viable alternative to the established descriptors.