3D Face Recognition Based on Depth and Intensity Gabor Features using Symbolic PCA and AdaBoost

Traditional 2D face recognition based on optical (intensity or color) images faces many challenges, such as illumination, expression, and pose variation. In fact, the human face generates not only 2D texture information but also 3D shape information. In this paper, the objective is to investigate what contributions depth and intensity information make to the solution of face recognition problem when expression and pose variations are taken into account, and a novel system is proposed for combining depth and intensity information in order to improve face recognition performance. In the proposed approach, local features based on Gabor wavelets are extracted from depth and intensity images, which are obtained from 3D data after fine alignment. Then a novel hierarchical selecting scheme embedded in symbolic principal component analysis (Symbolic PCA) and AdaBoost learning is proposed to select the most effective and most robust features and to construct a strong classifier. Experiments are performed on the three datasets, namely,Texas 3D face database, Bhosphorus 3D face database and CASIA 3D face database, which contain face images with complex variations, including expressions, poses and long time lapses between two scans. The experimental results demonstrate the enhanced effectiveness in the performance of the proposed method. Since most of the design processes are performed automatically, the proposed approach leads to a potential prototype design of an automatic face recognition system based on the combination of the depth and intensity information in face images.