Inspired by Bertillon - Recognition based on anatomical features from 3D face scans

We present an automatic 3D face recognition algorithm that is inspired by Alphonse Bertillon´s anthropometry. Our recognition pipeline consists of several steps. First, the facial landmarks such as the tip of the nose or the inner eye corners are detected. Subsequently the head rotation is compensated during the orientation normalization process. The facial features are extracted by performing 61 different measures. We also present a feature evaluation function that rates individual components of the feature vector. Finally, our results are compared with two other 3D face recognition methods. We show that the multi-algorithmic system consisting of the anatomical-based recognition together with the eigenfaces method and the recognition using histogram-based features reaches significantly better results than any of the employed methods individually.