Heat front propagation contours for 3D face recognition

Face recognition is a key biometric method aiming at identifying individuals by the features of face. Due to the challenges facing face recognition from 2D images, researchers have resorted to 3D face recognition. Our work in this paper is motivated by the recent and remarkable success of heat-based features for 3D object classification and retrieval. We propose an approach for 3D face recognition based on the front contours of heat propagation over the face surface. The front contours are extracted automatically as heat is propagating starting from a detected set of landmarks. The propagation contours are used to successfully discriminate the various faces. The proposed approach is evaluated on the largest publicly available database of 3D facial images and successfully compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in the literature.