The core capabilities of L-1 3D face reader solutions are achieved with advanced 3D machine vision technology. Machine vision is perfectly suited for facial recognition and the enterprise access division of L-1 has developed a suite of industry leading solutions around this core capability.
The need for a facial recognition system, which is both accurate and non-intrusive, has been sharply increased by wide scale public demand for more effective security and monitoring systems. Additionally there are new incentives to invest in security infrastructure by government, law enforcement agencies and corporations.
Core Technology
Face recognition technology from the L-1 Enterprise Access Division enables the real-time capture of three-dimensional images of a subject’s face. The unique features of the subject’s cranio-facial structure are extracted and stored as a biometric template for automated human recognition. The method can be used either in identification or in verification.
How 3D Face Recognition Works
The below details the major steps of how the technology captures, constructs, extracts and matches a 3D mesh of the face.
Face Capturing
The enterprise access division’s proprietary hardware for face capturing – or the acquisition of facial data – works on the principle of structured or coded lighting. The essence of structured lighting consists in projecting a pattern of known space structure at the subject’s face. The structured light is distorted by the individual facial geometry, and these distortions are unambiguously defined by the form of the scanned surface. Having defined compatibility between elements of the initial and determined structure of the coded light beam, by means of reconstruction algorithms, it is possible to precisely restore the geometry of the registered surface.
Face capturing refers to the moment when the camera and the special light take a “picture” of the target. This module includes the software necessary to automate the acquisition process by mean of computers. The software controls the hardware functionality and synchronizes all the necessary steps of the acquisition process. A simplified scheme on how the capturing works is represented in Figure 2 below.
3D Reconstruction
The second step is the reconstruction of the 3D surface illustrated in Figure 3 below. This module uses a set of proprietary algorithms, designed for surface reconstruction and optimization, based on data received from the camera. After receiving raw data (the distorted pattern on the target object), the 3D Reconstruction algorithms perform image filtering (noise reduction), and then instantly reconstructs the 3D surface, smoothing and interpolating data to avoid holes and optimizing the mesh.
The algorithm has to recognize the pattern projected onto the surface and calculate, by means of triangulations, all three coordinates of the sampled points on the surface. This will result in the surface described in the form of a cloud of points. After this step, the system will interpolate all the points by mean of a mesh.
Next, if the color surface was captured by an L-1 3D face reader, the surface can then be calculated and over-imposed onto the mesh. The texture can be overlapped (after an automatic adaptation) on the 3D surface. This stage is not relevant for devices using the 3D video unit, where the surface texture is not captured.
It is important to stress that the texture is NOT needed for recognition purposes. The output of this module is the optimized 3D surface or 3D mesh, suitable for further use in the recognition process.