Pose-invariant 2.5D face recognition using Geodesic Texture Warping

In recent years, 3D face recognition has become a popular solution to deal with the problem of pose-invariant face recognition. The majority of 3D face data are, however, actually 2.5D which are sensitive to pose variations. This paper presents a novel Geodesic Texture Warping (GTW) solution for 2.5D pose-invariant face recognition. In this method, we use the geodesic distance computed on a 2.5D face scan to warp the texture of a rotated face to that of a frontal one to perform matching. A feasibility and effectiveness investigation for the proposed method is conducted using a wide range of experiments including samples with different face rotations. The encouraging experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art method with a low computational cost.