A Novel Single View Passive 3D Face Camera for 3D Face Image Acquisition and Facial Recognition

"Due to the lack of low-cost 3D biometric imaging sensors and effective 3D facial recognition (FR) algorithms, almost all existing FR systems use 2D face images. The result is that they are inherently vulnerable to changes in pose, lighting andexpression. Error rates for existing 2D FR systems in real-world applications are very high when forced to deal with large variations in pose, lighting and expression, as evidenced in the latest Facial Recognition Vendor Tests (FRVT). The primary objective of the SBIR effort proposed herein is to investigate the feasibility of a novel single view passive 3D facial camera. The proposed approach to 3D facial image acquisition eliminates the need of bulky and complex 3D imagingequipment, and simplifies the 3D facial image acquisition procedure. The resulting 3D face models have sufficient quality for tasks of pose/light/expression correction. Furthermore, the approach is coherently integrated with the 3D facial recognitionmechanism. Single view acquisition of 3D facial images represents breakthrough technology with respect to ease of application within existing security infrastructures and the potential to significantly enhance face recognition performance. The ultimategoal of our research is to build 3D face camera hardware and software with embedded processing ability that is able to acquire real-time 3D face image in practical FR application scenario. The tragic events of 9/11 have tr