A critical assessment of 2D and 3D face recognition algorithms

We present the results of a project aimed to evaluate 2D and 3D face recognition algorithms. In particular, we focused on the potentialities of 3D-based techniques to overcome typical limitations of 2D methods in non-controlled situations. According to the reference scenario of people identification at airport check points, we built a representative database on which we tested different face recognition algorithms. We implemented and tested an improved version of a well-known state-of-the-art 3D approach, and verified that on our dataset it performs better than a widely used commercial system.