Automatic Quality Assessment and Preprocessing for Three-Dimensional Face Recognition

The quality of biometric samples plays an important role in biometric authentication systems because it has a direct impact on verification or identification performance. In this paper, we present a novel 3D face recognition system which performs quality assessment on input images prior to recognition. More specifically, a reject option is provided to allow the system operator to eliminate the incoming images of poor quality, e. g. failure acquisition of 3D image, exaggerated facial expressions, etc.. Furthermore, a fully automatic preprocessing method is presented in this paper. The experimental results show that the 3D face recognition performance is significantly improved by taking the quality of 3D facial images into account. The proposed system achieves the verification rate of 97.09% on the FRGC v2.0 data set.