Kinect vs lytro in RGB-D face recognition

Light field cameras are becoming increasingly popular thanks to higher capabilities with respect to regular cameras in capturing information of a scene. Even though the principle associated with structured light sensors is quite different from the technology behind light field cameras, data provided by these technologies are similar in terms of depth map. With the aim of comparing the potential of Kinect and Lytro sensors on face recognition, two experiments are conducted on separate but publically available datasets and validated on a database acquired simultaneously with Lytro Illum camera and Kinect V1 sensor. The results obtained on RGB and depth maps are integrated with an experiment based on fusion at score level. The introduction of depth information in the RGB data is found more effective than standard bi dimensional imaging, especially in case of occlusions.