Noise modelling for denoising and three-dimensional face recognition algorithms performance evaluation

This study proposes an algorithm is proposed to quantitatively evaluate the performance of three-dimensional (3D) holistic face recognition algorithms when various denoising methods are used. First, a method is proposed to model the noise on the 3D face datasets. The model not only identifies those regions on the face which are sensitive to the noise but can also be used to simulate noise for any given 3D face. Then, by incorporating the noise model in a novel 3D face recognition pipeline, seven different classification and matching methods and six denoising techniques are used to quantify the face recognition algorithms performance for different powers of the noise. The outcome: (i) shows the most reliable parameters for the denoising methods to be used in a 3D face recognition pipeline; (ii) shows which parts of the face are more vulnerable to noise and require further post-processing after data acquisition; and (iii) compares the performance of three different categories of recognition algorithms: training-free matching-based, subspace projection-based and training-based (without projection) classifiers. The results show the high performance of the bootstrap aggregating tree classifiers and median filtering for very high intensity noise. Moreover, when different noisy/denoised samples are used as probes or in the gallery, the matching algorithms significantly outperform the training-based (including the subspace projection) methods.