Which parts of the face give out your identity?

We present a Markov Random Field model for the analysis of lattices (e.g., images or 3D meshes) in terms of the discriminative information of their vertices. The proposed method provides a measure field that estimates the probability of each vertex to be “discriminative” or “non-discriminative”. As an application of the proposed framework, we present a method for the selection of compact and robust features for 3D face recognition. The resulting signature consists of 360 coefficients, based on which we are able to build a classifier yielding better recognition rates than currently reported in the literature. The main contribution of this work lies in the development of a novel framework for feature selection in scenarios in which the most discriminative information is known to be concentrated along piece-wise smooth regions of a lattice.