Biometric user authentication based on 3D face recognition under ubiquitous computing environment

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a biometric user authentication system based on 3-dimensional (3D) face recognition under ubiquitous computing environment. Since 2D based face recognition has been shown its structural limitation, 3D model based approach for face recognition has been spotlighted as a robust solution under variant conditions of pose and illumination. Since 3D face model consists of a large number of vertices, 3D model based face recognition system is generally inefficient for real-time computation. We propose a novel 3D face representation algorithm to reduce the number of vertices and optimize its computation time while maintaining reasonable recognition performance. We evaluate the performance of proposed algorithm with the Korean face database collected using a stereo-vision based 3D face capturing device. Additionally, various decision making similarity measures were explored for recognition performance. Our experimental results indicated that our proposed algorithm is robust for biometric user authentication and is also reasonably fast for real-time processing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.