Mixed 2D-3D information for pose estimation and face recognition

Face recognition based on 3D techniques is a promising approach since it takes advantage of the additional information provided by depth which makes the whole approach more robust against illumination and pose variations. However, these 3D approaches require the cooperation of the person to acquire accurate 3D data; thus, they are not appropriated for some applications such as video surveillance or restricted area access points where only a 2D face image is disposable. In this paper, a novel approach is presented which takes advantage of 3D data in the training stage but only requires 2D data in the recognition stage. The proposed method can be used for both pose estimation and face recognition. Moreover, the estimation of the pose can be used as side information to improve the performance of the face recognition stage. Experiments have been carried out on the public UPC face database which is composed of a total of 621 face images of several persons taken from different views and illuminations.