Enhancing 3D Face Recognition: Achieving Significant Gains via 2D-Aided Generative Augmentation

The development of deep learning-based 3D face recognition has been constrained by the limited availability of large-scale 3D facial datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to acquire. To address this challenge, we propose a novel 2D-aided framework that reconstructs 3D face geometries from abundant 2D images, enabling scalable and cost-effective data augmentation for 3D face recognition. Our pipeline integrates 3D face reconstruction with normal component image encoding and fine-tunes a deep face recognition model to learn discriminative representations from synthetic 3D data. Experimental results on four public benchmarks, i.e., the BU-3DFE, FRGC v2, Bosphorus, and BU-4DFE databases, demonstrate competitive rank-1 accuracies of 99.2%, 98.4%, 99.3%, and 96.5%, respectively, despite the absence of real 3D training data. We further evaluate the impact of alternative reconstruction methods and empirically demonstrate that higher-fidelity 3D inputs improve recognition performance. While synthetic 3D face data may lack certain fine-grained geometric details, our results validate their effectiveness for practical recognition tasks under diverse expressions and demographic conditions. This work provides an efficient and scalable paradigm for 3D face recognition by leveraging widely available face images, offering new insights into data-efficient training strategies for biometric systems.