Three-dimensional occlusion detection and restoration . . .

This paper presents an innovative three dimen-sional occlusion detection and restoration strategy for the recognition of three dimensional faces partially occluded by unforeseen, extraneous objects. The detection method con-siders occlusions as local deformations of the face that cor-respond to perturbations in a space designed to represent non-occluded faces. Once detected, occlusions represent missing information, or “holes ” in the faces. The restora-tion module exploits the information provided by the non-occluded part of the face to recover the whole face, using an appropriate basis for the space in which non-occluded faces lie. The restoration strategy does not depend on the method used to detect occlusions and can also be applied to restore faces in the presence of noise and missing pixels due to ac-quisition inaccuracies. The strategy has been experimented on the occluded acquisitions taken from the Bosphorus 3D face database. A method for the generation of real-looking occlusions is also presented. Artificial occlusions, applied to the UND database, allowed for an in-depth analysis of the capabilities of our approach. Experimental results demon-strate the robustness and feasibility of our approach