Metrological characterization of 3D biometric face recognition systems in actual operating conditions

Nowadays, face recognition systems are going to widespread in many fields of application, from automatic user login for financial activities and access to restricted areas, to surveillance for improving security in airports and railway stations, to cite a few. In such scenarios, the architectures based on stereo vision and 3D reconstruction of the face are going to assume a predominant role because they can generally assure a better reliability than solutions based on a single camera (which make use of a single image instead of a couple of images). To realize such systems, different architectures can be considered by varying the positioning of the pair of cameras with respect to the face of the subject to be identified, as well as both kind and resolution of camera considered. These parameters can affect the correct decision rate of the system in classifying the input face, especially in presence of image uncertainty. In this paper, several 3D architectures differing in camera specifications and geometrical positioning of the camera pair (with respect to the input face) are realized and compared. The detection of facial features in the images is made by adopting a popular method based on the Active Appearance Model (AAM) algorithm. 3D position of facial features is then obtained by means of stereo triangulation. The performance of the realized systems has been compared in terms of sensitivity to the quantities of influence and related uncertainty, and of typical indexes for the analysis of classification systems. Main results of such comparison show that the best performance can be reached by reducing the distance between cameras and subject to be identified and by minimizing the horizontal angle between the plane containing the camera pair axis and the face to be identified.