Face recognition across pose: A review

One of the major challenges encountered by current face recognition techniques lies in the difficulties of handling varying poses, i.e., recognition of faces in arbitrary in-depth rotations. The face image differences caused by rotations are often larger than the inter-person differences used in distinguishing identities. Face recognition across pose, on the other hand, has great potentials in many applications dealing with uncooperative subjects, in which the full power of face recognition being a passive biometric technique can be implemented and utilised. Extensive efforts have been put into the research toward pose-invariant face recognition in recent years and many prominent approaches have been proposed. However, several issues in face recognition across pose still remain open, such as lack of understanding about subspaces of pose variant images, problem intractability in 3D face modelling, complex face surface reflection mechanism, etc. This paper provides a critical survey of researches on image-based face recognition across pose. The existing techniques are comprehensively reviewed and discussed. They are classified into different categories according to their methodologies in handling pose variations. Their strategies, advantages/disadvantages and performances are elaborated. By generalising different tactics in handling pose variations and evaluating their performances, several promising directions for future research have been suggested. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.