THREE-DIMENSIONAL FACE RECOGNITION

Apparatus for obtaining 3-Dimensional data of a geometric body for matching, and particularly for use in facial matching, comprises a three dimensional scanner for obtaining three-dimensional topographical data of the body, a triangulator for receiving or forming said data into a triangulated manifold, a geodesic converter, for converting the triangulated manifold into a series of geodesic distances between pairs of points of the manifold, and a multi-dimensional scaler, for forming a low dimensional Euclidean representation of the series of geodesic distances, to give a bending invariant representation of the geometric body. In one variant, matching is carried out by taking the principle eigenvalues from the representation and plotting as co-ordinates in a feature space. Tilted or different expression versions of the same face tend to form clusters in the feature space allowing for matching. The apparatus preferably uses the fast marching method for the triangulated domain to obtain the geodesic distances.