Efficient 3D reconstruction for face recognition

Face recognition with variant pose, illumination and expression (PIE) is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an analysis-by-synthesis framework for face recognition with variant PIE. First, an efficient 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is introduced to reconstruct a personalized 3D face model from a single frontal face image with neutral expression and normal illumination; Then, realistic virtual faces with different PIE are synthesized based on the personalized 3D face to characterize the face subspace; Finally, face recognition is conducted based on these representative virtual faces. Compared with other related work, this framework has following advantages: 1) only one single frontal face is required for face recognition, which avoids the burdensome enrollment work; 2) the synthesized face samples provide the capability to conduct recognition under difficult conditions like complex PIE; and 3) compared with other 3D reconstruction approaches, our proposed 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is fully automatic and more efficient. The extensive experimental results show that the synthesized virtual faces significantly improve the accuracy of face recognition with changing PIE.