Facial shape spaces from surface normals

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on ideas from the field of statistical shape analysis to construct shape-spaces that span facial expressions and gender, and use the resulting shape-model to perform face recognition under varying expression and gender. Our novel contribution is to show how to construct shape-spaces over fields of surface normals rather than Cartesian landmark points. According to this model face needle-maps (or fields of surface normals) are points in a high-dimensional manifold referred to as a shape-space. We compute geodesic distances to compare the similarity between faces and gender difference. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.