3D Face Recognition: The Ultimate Biometric Lock

Ron Kimmel

Abstract

At the Geometric Image Processing Lab., together with the Bronstein brothers, and with the help of lab engineer E. Gordon, we built a system that can distinguish between two identical twins based on 3D pictures of their faces. Our system can recognize faces under various poses and facial expressions. In this talk I will review the components of our system and some theoretical problems and technical challenges, like flat embedding. The numerical building blocks include:

1. Kimmel, Sethian, "Fast marching on triangulated domains scheme, that efficiently computes geodesic distances on triangulated surfaces"

2. Elad, Kimmel, "Bending invariant signatures for isometric surfaces. A method for matching isometric surfaces"

3. Bronstein, Bronstein, Kimmel, "Eigen-forms for expression invariant 3D face recognition"

Some keywords: Eikonal solvers, geodesic distance maps, Multidimensional scaling, dimensionality reduction, eigen-decomposition/flattening of geometric structures.

Bio

Ron Kimmel is a Technion, Israel Institute of Technology graduate (D.Sc. 1995). During 1995-1998 he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley Labs, and UC Berkeley. Since 1998, he has been a faculty member of Computer Science at the Technion, where he is currently an associate professor. He is now a visiting Professor at the Computer Science Department, Stanford University, and working with MediGuide Inc. (medical imaging).

His research interests are in differential geometry, scientific computing, image processing and analysis, biometrics, robotic navigation, and computer graphics. Prof. Kimmel was awarded the Rich innovation award (twice), the Taub Prize for excellence in research, and the Alon, HTI, Wolf, Gutwirth, Ollendorff, and Jury fellowships.

He is an associate editor of Int. J. of Computer Vision and IEEE Trans. on Image Processing (and other journals). He has been a long term consultant of HP research Lab (1998-2000), Net2Wireless/Jigami research (2000-2001), and MediGuide (2002-2004).

Contact information:
Ron Kimmel
CS Dept. Technion
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ron
http://www-sccm.stanford.edu/~ronk

Maintained by Philippos Mordohai