Albert Ali Salah
We measured the effect of beard on 3D face recognition...

Department of Computer Engineering,
Boğaziçi University 
34342 Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey
email: salah_at_boun.edu.tr




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PhD Dissertation: Biologically Motivated 3D Face Recognition

Face recognition has been an active area of study for both computer vision and image processing communities, not only for biometrics but also for human-computer interaction applications. The purpose of the present work is to evaluate the existing 3D face recognition techniques and seek biologically motivated methods to improve them. We especially look at findings in psychophysics and cognitive science for insights. We propose a biologically motivated computational model, and focus on the earlier stages of the model, whose performance is critical for the later stages. Our emphasis is on automatic localization of facial features. We first propose a strong unsupervised learning algorithm for flexible and automatic training of Gaussian mixture models and use it in a novel feature-based algorithm for facial fiducial point localization. We also propose a novel structural correction algorithm to evaluate the quality of landmarking and to localize fiducial points under adverse conditions. We test the effects of automatic landmarking under rigid and non-rigid registration methods. For the rigid registration approach, we implement the iterative closest point method (ICP). The most important drawback of ICP is the computational cost of registering a test scan to each scan in the gallery. By using an average face model in rigid registration, we show that the computation bottleneck can be eliminated. Following psychophysical arguments on the "other race effect", we reason that organizing faces into different gender and morphological groups will help us in designing more discriminative classifiers. We test this claim by employing different average face models for dense registration. We propose a shape-based clustering approach that assigns faces into groups with nondescript gender and race. Finally, we propose a regular re-sampling step that increases the speed and the accuracy significantly. These components make up a full 3D face recognition system.


This work was the recipient of the European Biometrics Forum 2006 Biometrics Research Award. It was supported by the following projects:

Master Thesis - Selective Attention Based Pattern Recognition

The human visual mechanism, which develops in parallel with the brain, is physically very complex and functions in a very efficient manner. Human vision is mainly a serial process, in that we do not absorb the whole information content of the visual field at once, but selectively attend to locations that have low probability, and thus contain more information. Our aim is to model this process in a biologically plausible framework to achieve some of the desired properties of natural visual systems.

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Invitation to Cognitive Science

Would you be interested in a Cognitive Science program in Boğaziçi University? Visit the M.A. Program in Cognitive Science webpage.

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Last Updated: Aug. 2011