Examining Virtual Busts: Are Photogrammetrically Generated Head Models Effective for Person Identification?

We examined the effectiveness of using 3D, visual, digital representations of human heads and faces (i.e., virtual busts) for person identification. In a series of 11 studies, participants learned a number of human faces from analog photographs. We then crafted virtual busts from those analog photographs, and compared recognition of photographs of the virtual busts to the original analog photographs. We demonstrated that the accuracy of person identification using photographs of virtual busts is high in an absolute sense, but not as high as using the original analog photographs. We present a paradigm for comparing the similarity, both structural (objectively similar in shape) and subjective (subjectively in the eyes of a viewer) of virtual busts to analog photographs, with the goal of beginning the discussion of a uniform standard for assessing the fidelity of digital models of human faces.

[1]  P. E. Morris,et al.  Practical aspects of memory : current research and issues , 1988 .

[2]  Christian A. Meissner,et al.  Applied issues in the construction and expert assessment of photo lineups. , 1999 .

[3]  Jeremy N. Bailenson,et al.  Using Virtual Heads for Person Identification : An Empirical Study Comparing Photographs to Photogrammetrically-Generated Models , 2003 .

[4]  Gary L. Wells.  Eyewitness Identification: Psychological Aspects , 2002 .

[5]  C. Liu,et al.  Does Face Recognition Rely on Encoding of 3-D Surface? Examining the Role of Shape-from-Shading and Shape-from-Stereo , 2000, Perception.

[6]  J. Cutting,et al.  Recognizing friends by their walk: Gait perception without familiarity cues , 1977 .

[7]  T. Busey.  Physical and Psychological Representations of Faces: Evidence From Morphing , 1998 .

[8]  H. Bülthoff,et al.  Face recognition under varying poses: The role of texture and shape , 1996, Vision Research.

[9]  V. Bruce,et al.  The basis of the 3/4 view advantage in face recognition , 1987 .

[10]  Steven D. Penrod,et al.  Reinstatement of context in a field experiment on eyewitness identification. , 1985 .

[11]  Thomas Vetter,et al.  A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[12]  Tomaso Poggio,et al.  Automatic person recognition by acoustic and geometric features , 1995 .

[13]  L. Whitaker.  Anthropometry of the Head and Face in Medicine. , 1983 .

[14]  Roy S. Malpass,et al.  Eyewitness identification: Lineup instructions and the absence of the offender. , 1981 .

[15]  K. Taylor.  Forensic Art and Illustration , 2000 .

[16]  Marian Stewart Bartlett,et al.  Image Representations for Facial Expression Coding , 1999, NIPS.

[17]  Larry S. Davis,et al.  Person identification using automatic height and stride estimation , 2002, Object recognition supported by user interaction for service robots.

[18]  John Prag,et al.  Making Faces: Using forensic and archaeological evidence , 1999 .

[19]  E. Tulving.  Elements of episodic memory , 1983 .

[20]  Matthew Stone,et al.  An anthropometric face model using variational techniques , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[21]  M. Tarr,et al.  Orientation Priming of Novel Shapes in the Context of Viewpoint-Dependent Recognition , 1997, Perception.