3D Face Recognition
The Ultimate Biometric Lock

Ron Kimmel
CS Dept. Technion
(Visiting Stanford)

At the Geometric Image Processing Lab., together with Alexander and Michael Bronstein, and with the help of lab engineer Eyal Gordon, we built a system that can distinguish between two identical twins (Michael and Alexander) based on 3D pictures of their faces. Our system can recognize faces under various poses and facial expressions.

In this talk I will review the components of our system and some theoretical problems and technical challenges. The numerical building blocks include

1. Kimmel-Sethian fast marching on triangulated domains (FMTD) scheme, that efficiently computes geodesic distances on triangulated surfaces.
2. Elad-Kimmel bending invariant signatures for isometric surfaces. A method for matching isometric surfaces. and the
3. Bronstein²-Kimmel eigen-forms for expression invariant 3D face recognition.

About the speaker:

Ron Kimmel is a Technion, Israel Institute of Technology graduate (D.Sc. 1995). During 1995-1998 he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley Labs, and UC Berkeley. Since 1998, he has been a faculty member of Computer Science at the Technion, where he is currently an associate professor. He is now a visiting Professor at the Computer Science Department, Stanford University, and working with MediGuide Inc.

His research interests are in differential geometry, scientific computing, image processing and analysis, robotic navigation, and computer graphics. Prof. Kimmel was awarded the Rich innovation award (twice), the Taub Prize for excellence in research, and the Alon, HTI, Wolf, Gutwirth, Ollendorff, and Jury fellowships.

He has been a long term consultant of HP research Lab (1998-2000), Net2Wireless/Jigami research (2000-2001), and MediGuide (2002-2003).

Contact information:

Ron Kimmel
CS Dept. Technion
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ron
http://www-sccm.stanford.edu/~ronk
Email: ron@cs.technion.ac.il