223 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 12 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0900-6.ch012 INTRODUCTION In recent years, a lot of research efforts have been devoted to define and develop methods capable to represent multimedia digital content with the aim to provide effective and efficient access to multimedia information. In so doing, various types of multimedia information have been con- sidered, such as text, images, graphics, video and audio files, and 3D objects. In general, the set of technologies used to search for various types of digital multimedia are referred to as multimedia information retrieval (Lew et al., 2006; Datta et al., 2008). Stefano Berretti University of Firenze, Italy Alberto Del Bimbo University of Firenze, Italy Pietro Pala University of Firenze, Italy 3D Face Reconstruction from Two Orthogonal Images for Face Recognition Applications ABSTRACT In this paper, an original hybrid 2D-3D face recognition approach is proposed using two orthogonal face images, frontal and side views of the face, to reconstruct the complete 3D geometry of the face. This is obtained using a model based solution, in which a 3D template face model is morphed according to the correspondence of a limited set of control points identifed on the frontal and side images in addition to the model. Control points identifcation is driven by an Active Shape Model applied to the frontal image, whereas subsequent manual assistance is required for control points localization on the side view. The reconstructed 3D model is fnally matched, using the iso-geodesic regions approach against a gallery of 3D face scans for the purpose of face recognition. Preliminary experimental results are provided on a small database showing the viability of the approach.