Strategies and Benefits of Fusion of 2D and 3D Face Recognition

The extension of 2D image-based face recognition methods with respect to 3D shape information and the fusion of both modalities is one of the main topics in the recent development of facial recognition. In this paper we discuss different strategies and their expected benefit for the fusion of 2D and 3D face recognition. The face recognition grand challenge (FRGC) provides for the first time ever a public benchmark dataset of a suitable size to evaluate the accuracy of both 2D and 3D face recognition. We use this benchmark to evaluate hierarchical graph matching (HGM), an universal approach to 2D and 3D face recognition, and demonstrate the benefit of different fusion strategies. The results show that HGM yields the best results presented at the recent FRGC workshop, that 2D face recognition is significantly more accurate than 3D face recognition and that the fusion of both modalities leads to a further improvement of the 2D results.