title: Three-dimensional shape and two-dimensional surface reflectance contributions to face recognition: an application of three-dimensional morphing.
abstract: We measured the three-dimensional shape and two-dimensional surface reflectance contributions to human recognition of faces across viewpoint. We first divided laser scans of human heads into their two- and three-dimensional components. Next, we created shape-normalized faces by morphing the two-dimensional surface reflectance maps of each face onto the average three-dimensional head shape and reflectance-normalized faces by morphing the average two-dimensional surface reflectance map onto each three-dimensional head shape. Observers learned frontal images of the original, shape-normalized, or reflectance-normalized faces, and were asked to recognize the faces from viewpoint changes of 0, 30 and 60 degrees. Both the three-dimensional shape and two-dimensional surface reflectance information contributed substantially to human recognition performance, thus constraining theories of face representation to include both types of information.
authors.affiliation: University of Texas at Dallas, School of Human Development, Richardson 75083-0688, USA. otoole@utdallas.edu
authors.forename: A J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: O'Toole
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Vetter
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Blanz
mesh_terms: D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D005145:Face; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*