Patent ID: 7697735

Claim:
A face recognition method, the method performed by a computer and comprising: selecting a single image of a face; locating facial features in the single image; determining whether a plurality of the located facial features lie within a plane; responsive at least in part to determining whether the plurality of the located facial features lie within a plane, determining whether the single image represents a recorded image of an individual; responsive at least in part to determining that the single image does not represent a recorded image of an individual: comparing facial features located in the single image with facial features of a reference image; comparing iris features in the single image with iris features in the reference image; comparing skin characteristics in the single image with skin characteristics in the reference image, the comparison of skin characteristics comprising: locating skin areas in the face suitable for skin texture analysis; responsive to locating the facial features, detecting deformation of the located skin areas; responsive to detecting the deformation, warping, aligning, and normalizing the located skin areas to account for the deformation, resulting in modified skin areas; and extracting skin characteristics from the modified skin areas; calculating a similarity score between the single image and the reference image based on the facial feature comparison, the iris feature comparison, and the skin characteristics comparison; and recognizing the face based at least in part on the calculated similarity score.