3D face discriminant analysis using gauss-markov posterior marginals

We present a Markov Random Field model for the analysis of lattices (e.g., images or 3D meshes) in terms of the discriminative information of their vertices. The proposed method provides a measure field that estimates the probability of each vertex being discriminative or nondiscriminative for a given classification task. To illustrate the applicability and generality of our framework, we use the estimated probabilities as feature scoring to define compact signatures for three different classification tasks: 1) 3D Face Recognition, 2) 3D Facial Expression Recognition, and 3) Ethnicity-based Subject Retrieval, obtaining very competitive results. The main contribution of this work lies in the development of a novel framework for feature selection in scenaria in which the most discriminative information is smoothly distributed along a lattice.