Point cloud based deep convolutional neural network for 3D face recognition

Face recognition is a challenging task as it has to deal with several issues such as illumination orientation and variability among the different faces. Previous works have shown that 3D face is a robust biometric trait and is less sensitive to light and pose variations. Also due to availability of inexpensive sensors and new 3D data acquisition techniques it has become easy to capture 3D data. A 3D depth image of a face is found to be rich in information and biometric recognition performance can be enhanced by using 3D face data along with convolutional neural network. However the shortcoming of this approach is the conversion of 3D data to lower dimensions (depth image) which suffer from loss of geometric information and the network becomes computationally expensive. In this work we endeavor to apply deep learning method for 3D face recognition and propose a deep convolutional neural network based on PointNet architecture which consumes point cloud directly as input and siamese network for similarity learning. Further we propose a solution to the issue of a limited database by applying data augmentation at the point cloud level. Our proposed technique shows encouraging performance on Bosphorus and IIT Indore 3D face databases.