Towards non-conventional face recognition : shadow removal and heterogeneous scenario ; Vers la reconnaissance faciale non conventionnelle : suppression des ombres et scénario hétérogène

In recent years, biometrics have received substantial attention due to the evergrowing need for automatic individual authentication. Among various physiological biometric traits, face offers unmatched advantages over the others, such as fingerprints and iris, because it is natural, non-intrusive and easily understandable by humans. Nowadays conventional face recognition techniques have attained quasi-perfect performance in a highly constrained environment wherein poses, illuminations, expressions and other sources of variations are strictly controlled. However these approaches are always confined to restricted application fields because non-ideal imaging environments are frequently encountered in practical cases. To adaptively address these challenges, this dissertation focuses on this unconstrained face recognition problem, where face images exhibit more variability in illumination. Moreover, another major question is how to leverage limited 3D shape information to jointly work with 2D based techniques in a heterogeneous face recognition system. To deal with the problem of varying illuminations, we explicitly build the underlying reflectance model which characterizes interactions between skin surface, lighting source and camera sensor, and elaborate the formation of face color. With this physics-based image formation model involved, an illumination-robust representation, namely Chromaticity Invariant Image (CII), is proposed which can subsequently help reconstruct shadow-free and photo-realistic color face images. Due to the fact that this shadow removal process is achieved in color space, this approach could thus be combined with existing gray-scale level lighting normalization techniques to further improve face recognition performance. The experimental results on two benchmark databases, CMU-PIE and FRGC Ver2.0, demonstrate the generalization ability and robustness of our approach to lighting variations. We further explore the effective and creative use of 3D data in heterogeneous face recognition. In such a ...