Facial Similarity Measure for Recognizing Monozygotic Twins Utilizing 3D Facial Landmarks, Efficient Geodesic Distance Computation, and Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Compared with 2D face recognition systems, 3D facial recognition has been a popular area of study in academia and industry because of its ability to detect human faces in an unconstrained environment more efficiently. This study presents a new 3D face identification method that uses 3D facial images to compute geodesic distances using 3D landmarks. Feature extraction is computationally more efficient than Euclidean distance using geodesic distance. This study aims to demonstrate how to differentiate identical twins based solely on facial features by developing an efficient algorithm for calculating geodesic paths and distances. We employed the A*, Dijkstra, and fast marching (FM) algorithms to calculate the geodesic distance. Quantitative similarity metrics are obtained and then utilized as inputs in numerous classification methods: random forest (RF), extra tree classifier (ETC), light gradient boosting machine (LGBM), support vector machine (SVM), and bagging classifiers. An expression challenge dataset for 3D twins (3D-TEC), the most challenging data set for 3D face recognition research at Notre Dame University, was used to validate and test the performance of these algorithms. The recall, accuracy, precision, training time, and F1 score were compared for each classifier to determine the best performance. The results from the experiment indicate that, when compared to other algorithms and classification models, the Extra Tree Classifier is the most accurate (by 90%) in predicting face images, whereas A∗ is the best technique for computing geodesic distance.