Face Recognition Using 2D and 3D Facial Data

Results are presented for the largest experimental study to date that investigates the comparison and combination of 2D and 3D face recognition. To our knowledge, this is also the only such study to incorporate significant time lapse between gallery and probe image acquisition, and to look at the effect of depth resolution. Recognition results are obtained in (1) single gallery and a single probe study, and (2) a single gallery and multiple probe study. A total of 275 subjects participated in one or more data acquisition sessions. Results are presented for gallery and probe datasets of 200 subjects imaged in both 2D and 3D, with one to thirteen weeks time lapse between gallery and probe images of a given subject yielding 951 pairs of 2D and 3D images. Using a PCA-based approach tuned separately for 2D and for 3D, we find that 3D outperforms 2D. However, we also find a multi-modal rank-one recognition rate of 98.5% in a single probe study and 98.8% in multi-probe study, which is statistically significantly greater than either 2D or 3D alone.