A 3D Face Recognition Algorithm Directly Applied to Point Clouds

Face recognition technology, despite its widespread use in various applications, still faces challenges related to occlusions, pose variations, and expression changes. Three-dimensional face recognition with depth information, particularly using point cloud-based networks, has shown effectiveness in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xingyi You, Xiaohu Zhao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-01-01
Series:Biomimetics
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/10/2/70
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Summary:Face recognition technology, despite its widespread use in various applications, still faces challenges related to occlusions, pose variations, and expression changes. Three-dimensional face recognition with depth information, particularly using point cloud-based networks, has shown effectiveness in overcoming these challenges. However, due to the limited extent of extensive 3D facial data and the non-rigid nature of facial structures, extracting distinct facial representations directly from point clouds remains challenging. To address this, our research proposes two key approaches. Firstly, we introduce a learning framework guided by a small amount of real face data based on morphable models with Gaussian processes. This system uses a novel method for generating large-scale virtual face scans, addressing the scarcity of 3D data. Secondly, we present a dual-branch network that directly extracts non-rigid facial features from point clouds, using kernel point convolution (KPConv) as its foundation. A local neighborhood adaptive feature learning module is introduced and employs context sampling technology, hierarchically downsampling feature-sensitive points critical for deep transfer and aggregation of discriminative facial features, to enhance the extraction of discriminative facial features. Notably, our training strategy combines large-scale face scanning data with 967 real face data from the FRGC v2.0 subset, demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding with a small amount of real face data. Experiments on the FRGC v2.0 dataset and the Bosphorus dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our method.
ISSN:2313-7673