Lab Meeting July 20, 2010 (Gary): Robust Unified Stereo-Based 3D Head Tracking and Its Application to Face Recognition (ICRA2010)

Title:
Robust Unified Stereo-Based 3D Head Tracking and Its Application
to Face Recognition

Authors: Kwang Ho An and Myung Jin Chung

Abstract:
This paper investigates the estimation of 3D head poses and its identity authentication with a partial ellipsoid model. To cope with large out-of-plane rotations and translation in-depth, we extend conventional head tracking with a single camera to a stereo-based framework. To achieve more robust motion estimation even under time-varying lighting conditions, we incorporate illumination correction into the aforementioned framework. We approximate the face image variations due to illumination changes as a linear combination of illumination bases. Also,��by computing the illumination bases online from the registered face images, after estimating the 3D head poses, user-specific illumination bases can be obtained, and therefore illumination-robust tracking without a prior learning process can be possible. Furthermore, our unified stereo-based tracking is approximated as a linear least-squares problem; a closed-form solution is then provided. After recovering the full-motions of the head, we can register face images with pose variations into stabilized-view images, which are suitable for pose-robust face recognition. To verify the feasibility and applicability of our approach, we performed extensive experiments with three sets of challenging image sequences.

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