Masked Face Recognition with 3D Facial Geometric Attributes

During the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for contactless biometrics technology has promoted the development of masked face recognition. Training a masked face recognition model needs to address two crucial issues: a lack of large-scale realistic masked face datasets and the difficulty of obtaining robust face representations due to the huge difference between complete faces and masked faces. To tackle with the first issue, this paper proposes to train a 3D masked face recognition network with non-masked face images. For the second issue, this paper utilizes the geometric features of 3D face, namely depth, azimuth, and elevation, to represent the face. The inherent advantages of 3D face enhance the stability and practicability of 3D masked face recognition network. In addition, a facial geometry extractor is proposed to highlight discriminative facial geometric features so that the 3D masked face recognition network can take full advantage of the depth, azimuth and elevation information in distinguishing face identities. The experimental results on four public 3D face datasets show that the proposed 3D masked face recognition network improves the accuracy of the masked face recognition, which verifies the feasibility of training the masked face recognition model with non-masked face images.