3D face recognition has become a trending research direction in both industry and academia. It inherits advantages from traditional 2D face recognition, such as the natural recognition process and a wide range of applications. Moreover, 3D face recognition systems could accurately recognize human faces even under dim lights and with variant facial positions and expressions, in such conditions 2D face recognition systems would have immense difficulty to operate. This paper summarizes the history and the most recent progresses in 3D face recognition research domain. The frontier research results are introduced in three categories: pose-invariant recognition, expression-invariant recognition, and occlusion-invariant recognition. To promote future research, this paper collects information about publicly available 3D face databases. This paper also lists important open problems.

中文翻译：

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3D人脸识别：一项调查

3D人脸识别已成为行业和学术界的趋势研究方向。它继承了传统2D人脸识别的优势，例如自然识别过程和广泛的应用程序。此外，即使在昏暗的灯光下以及具有各种面部位置和表情的3D人脸识别系统也可以准确识别人脸，在这种情况下2D人脸识别系统将很难操作。本文总结了3D人脸识别研究领域的历史和最新进展。前沿研究成果分为三类：姿势不变识别，表情不变识别和遮挡不变识别。为了促进未来的研究，本文收集了有关公开可用的3D人脸数据库的信息。