We present a novel 3D face recognition method that incorporates summation invariant features extracted from multiple sub-regions of a facial range images, and optimal fusion of similarity scores between corresponding sub-regions. The key innovation of this paper is the development of the fusion-based face recognition algorithm that delivers significant performance enhancement while requiring very little computation. Experiments on the FRGC (Face Recognition Grand Challenge) version 2 dataset show that our algorithm improves the recognition performance significantly in the presence of facial expressions.

This paper presents a novel 3-D multiregion face recognition algorithm that consists of new geometric summation invariant features and an optimal linear feature fusion method. A summation invariant, which captures local characteristics of a facial surface, is extracted from multiple subregions of a 3-D range image as the discriminative features. Similarity scores between two range images are calculated from the selected subregions. A novel fusion method that is based on a linear discriminant analysis is developed to maximize the verification rate by a weighted combination of these similarity scores. Experiments on the Face Recognition Grand Challenge V2.0 dataset show that this new algorithm improves the recognition performance significantly in the presence of facial expressions.

A novel family of 2D and 3D geometrically invariant features, called summation invariants is proposed for the recognition of the 3D surface of human faces. Focusing on a rectangular region surrounding the nose of a 3D facial depth map, a subset of the so called semi-local summation invariant features is extracted. Then the similarity between a pair of 3D facial depth maps is computed to determine whether they belong to the same person. Out of many possible combinations of these set of features, we select, through careful experimentation, a subset of features that yields best combined performance. Tested with the 3D facial data from the on-going Face Recognition Grand Challenge v1.0 dataset, the proposed new features exhibit significant performance improvement over the baseline algorithm distributed with the datase

A novel family of geometrically invariant features, called summation invariants are proposed for the recognition of the 3D surface of human faces. In particular, a 2D semi-local summation invariant feature is extracted from each column and each row of a rectangular region surrounding the nose of a 3D facial depth map. Through extensive experimentation, we empirically identify the most efficient 2D summation invariant features. We also investigate the proper pre-processing method for the 2D summation invariant features. Tested with the 3D facial data from the Face Recognition Grand Challenge v1.0 dataset, the proposed new features exhibit significant performance improvement over the baseline algorithm distributed with the dataset.

In this paper, we developed a family of 2D and 3D invariant features with applications to 3D human faces recognition. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) systematically deriving a family of novel features, called summation invariant that are invariant to Euclidean transformation in both 2D and 3D; (b) developing an effective method to apply summation invariant to the 3D face recognition problem. Tested with the 3D data from the face recognition grand challenge v1.0 dataset, the proposed new features exhibit achieves a performance that rivals the best 3D face recognition algorithms reported so far