A neural network-based point registration method for 3D rigid face image

Intelligent detection of human face image combined with the real-time video monitoring has been applied to improve the secure and protective possibility. The registration is an indispensible step before distinguishing the variation among the images. Neural network (NN) has a strong learning ability from a mass unstructured point cloud even containing noisy data. Neural network has been applied to register 3D reconstructed ear data and 3D surface of bunny and to achieve the better results. Motivated by this idea, NN-based registration method for 3D rigid face image is proposed. This paper presented the proof process of obtaining rotation matrix and translation vector according to the training process of neural network. Then the measure index of registration performance was provided. The elaborate experiments were conducted on the 3D USF face database (provided by the University of South Florida) to verify the effectiveness of neural network as a registration method. Next, two comparisons were performed, one group was NN-based and ICP-based registration methods and the other group was our proposed NN-based and other NN-based registration methods. The experimental results showed that neural network is a robust and potential registration method for rigid face image registration. Furthermore, our proposed NN-based registration method is extended easily to do 2D-to-3D registration and non-rigid face registration.