Accurate 3D face registration based on the symmetry plane analysis on nose regions

Three-dimensional face registration is a critical step in 3D face recognition. This paper presents a fully automatic registration method with high accuracy and robustness to facial expressions for aligning frontal 3D face data. In our method, the nose region, which is relatively more rigid than other facial regions in Anatomy sense, is automatically located and analyzed for computing the precise location of a symmetry plane. We then proceed on to find a stable reference point and a nose line from the global information of the nose region. In this way, the six degrees of freedom as well as a unified coordinate system can be determined for each face. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the FRGC V1.0 benchmark face dataset to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of our registration method. Firstly, we compare its results with manually marked points on the visualized face data. Secondly, we test its application in a 3-D face verification system. Preliminary experiment results show that this approach can efficiently reduce the intra-class distance and performs even better than the manual registration method in face recognition.