Impact analysis of nose alterations on 2D and 3D face recognition

Numerous major challenges in face recognition, such as pose, illumination, expression and aging, have been investigated extensively. All those variations modify the texture and/or the shape of the face in a similar manner for different individuals. However, studies on alterations applied on face via plastic surgery or prosthetic make-up which can be in countless different ways and amounts, are still very limited. In this paper, we analyze how such changes on nose region affect the face recognition performances of several key techniques. For this purpose, a simulated face database is prepared using FRGC v1.0 in which nose in each sample is replaced with another randomly chosen one. Since this is a 3D database, the impact analysis is not limited to only 2D, which is one of the novelties of this study. Performance comparisons of three 2D and four 3D algorithms are provided. In addition, differently from previous works, baseline results for the original database are also reported. Hence, the impact which is purely due to the applied nose alterations can be measured. The experimental results indicate that with the introduction of alterations both modalities lose precision, especially 3D.