Disentangled Face Identity Representations for joint 3D Face Recognition and Expression Neutralisation

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based approach for disentangling face identity representations from expressive 3D faces. Given a 3D face, our approach not only extracts a disentangled identity representation but also generates a realistic 3D face with a neutral expression while predicting its identity. The proposed network consists of three components; (1) a Graph Convolutional Autoencoder (GCA) to encode the 3D faces into latent representations, (2) a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that translates the latent representations of expressive faces into those of neutral faces, (3) and an identity recognition sub-network taking advantage of the neutralized latent representations for 3D face recognition. The whole network is trained in an end-to-end manner. Experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.