Applications

This chapter provides an overview of emerging 3D face processing applications and new trends of research interest. First an overview of the 3D face databases that are released for public use are presented, evidencing their main characteristics in terms of expression variations, pose changes, and presence of occlusions. A section deals with the state-of-the-art methods for 3D facial recognition. This is followed by a discussion on the challenges related to face recognition using 3D scans with non-frontal pose, missing parts, and occlusions. Methods that address this applicative scenario are reviewed. Another section reviews the state-of-the-art methods for facial expression recognition, and talks about two specific solutions that include a semi-automatic approach and a fully automatic solution. This section addresses the new challenges posed by the analysis of 3D dynamic face sequences for the purpose of facial expression recognition, and presents a recent method giving effective solution to this problem.