Automatic 3D face authentication

This paper presents automatic face authentication from facial surface analysis. This geometrical approach was motivated by difficulties encountered when considering frontal face recognition. Apart from being less sensitive to viewpoint and lighting conditions, the method exploits information which is complementary to gray level based approaches, enabling the fusion with those techniques. A 3D acquisition system based on structured light and adapted to facial surface capture is presented. It is cheap and fast while offering a sufficient resolution for face recognition purposes. The acquisition system and the 3D face comparison algorithm were designed to be integrated in security applications with cooperative scenario. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.