Fuzzy 3D face ethnicity categorization

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy 3D face ethnicity categorization algorithm, which contains two stages, learning and mapping. In learning stage, the visual codes are first learned for both the eastern and western individuals using the learned visual codebook (LVC) method, then from these codes we can learn two distance measures, merging distance and mapping distance. Using the merging distance, we can learn the eastern, western and human codes based on the visual codes. In mapping stage, we compute the probabilities for each 3D face mapped to eastern and western individuals using the mapping distance. And the membership degree is determined by our defined membership function. The main contribution of this paper is that we view ethnicity categorization as a fuzzy problem and give an effective solution to assign the 3D face a reasonable membership degree. All experiments are based on the challenging FRGC2.0 3D Face Database. Experimental results illustrate the efficiency and accuracy of our fuzzy 3D face ethnicity categorization method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.