3D face recognition in the presence of facial expressions based on empirical mode decomposition

This paper presents an efficient 3D face recognition method to handle facial expression. The proposed method uses the Surfaces Empirical Mode Decomposition (SEMD), facial curves and local shape descriptor in a matching process to overcome the distortions caused by expressions in faces. The basic idea is that, the face is presented at different scales by SEMD. Then the isometric invariant features on each scale are extracted. After that, the geometric information is obtained on the 3D surface in terms of radial and level facial curves. Finally, the feature vectors on each scale are associated with their corresponding geometric information. The presented method is validated on GavabDB database resulting a rank 1 recognition rate (RR) of 98.9% for all faces with neutral and non-neutral expressions. This result outperforms other 3D expression-invariant face recognition methods on the same database.