Facial feature extraction using a 4D stereo camera system

Facial feature recognition has received much attention among the researchers in computer vision. This paper presents a new approach for facial feature extraction. The work can be broadly classified into two stages, face acquisition and feature extraction. Face acquisition is done by a 4D stereo camera system from Dimensional Imaging and the data is available in ‘obj’ files generated by the camera system. The second stage illustrates extraction of important facial features. The algorithm developed for this purpose is inspired from the natural biological shape and structure of human face. The accuracy of identifying the facial points has been shown using simulation results. The algorithm is able to identify the tip of the nose, the point where nose meets the forehead, and near corners of both the eyes from the faces acquired by the camera system.