DESCRIBING THE SHAPES OF FACES USING SURFACE PRIMITIVES

Humans are poor at recognizing faces from images that convey the spati al layout of major features but that omit information (e.g. simple lin e drawings) or invert information (photographic negatives) about the i mage intensity. The role played by the image intensity may be to conve y useful information about surface pigmentation an&or 3D shape. To inv estigate the role played by the latter, in this paper we describe the development of a method for describing the 3D surface shape of individ ual faces explicitly, and consider some initial results which suggest that this method does capture some psychologically relevant dimensions of facial variation. Implications for machine recognition and other p ractical computer applications are discussed.