Biometrics empowered ambient intelligence environment

Abstract

The paper presents a face recognition system based on 3D features with the aim of verifying the identity of subjects accessing a controlled Ambient Intelligence Environment and customizing all the services accordingly. The proposed approach relies on stereoscopic face acquisition and 3D mesh reconstruction avoiding non automated and expensive 3D scanners, unsuitable for real time applications in general. A bidimensional feature descriptor is extracted from each 3D mesh. It consists in a color image transferring face's 3D features in a 2D space. An automatic weighting mask of each authorized person improves the robustness of recognition in presence of diverse facial expressions and beard. The experiments conducted show high average recognition rate and a measurable effectiveness of both flesh mask and expression weighting mask.