3D face sketch modeling and assessment for component based face recognition

3D facial representations have been widely used for face recognition. There has been intensive research on geometric matching and similarity measurement on 3D range data and 3D geometric meshes of individual faces. However, little investigation has been done on geometric measurement for 3D sketch models. In this paper, we study the 3D face recognition from 3D face sketches which are derived from hand-drawn sketches and machine generated sketches. First, we have developed a 3D sketch modeling approach to create 3D facial sketch models from 2D facial sketch images. Second, we compared the 3D sketches to the existing 3D scans. Third, the 3D face similarity is measured between 3D sketches versus 3D scans, and 3D sketches versus 3D sketches based on the spatial Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classification. Experiments are conducted on both the BU-4DFE database and YSU face sketch database, resulting in a recognition rate at around 92% on average.