2D Face Recognition System Based on Selected Gabor Filters and Linear Discriminant Analysis LDA

We present a new approach for face recognition system. The method is based on 2D face image features using subset of non-correlated and Orthogonal Gabor Filters instead of using the whole Gabor Filter Bank, then compressing the output feature vector using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The face image has been enhanced using multi stage image processing technique to normalize it and compensate for illumination variation. Experimental results show that the proposed system is effective for both dimension reduction and good recognition performance when compared to the complete Gabor filter bank. The system has been tested using CASIA, ORL and Cropped YaleB 2D face images Databases and achieved average recognition rate of 98.9 %

Eye Detection and Face Recognition Across the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Biometrics, or the science of identifying individuals based on their physiological or behavioral traits, has increasingly been used to replace typical identifying markers such as passwords, PIN numbers, passports, etc. Different modalities, such as face, fingerprint, iris, gait, etc. can be used for this purpose. One of the most studied forms of biometrics is face recognition (FR). Due to a number of advantages over typical visible to visible FR, recent trends have been pushing the FR community to perform cross-spectral matching of visible images to face images from higher spectra in the electromagnetic spectrum.;In this work, the SWIR band of the EM spectrum is the primary focus. Four main contributions relating to automatic eye detection and cross-spectral FR are discussed. First, a novel eye localization algorithm for the purpose of geometrically normalizing a face across multiple SWIR bands for FR algorithms is introduced. Using a template based scheme and a novel summation range filter, an extensive experimental analysis show that this algorithm is fast, robust, and highly accurate when compared to other available eye detection methods. Also, the eye locations produced by this algorithm provides higher FR results than all other tested approaches. This algorithm is then augmented and updated to quickly and accurately detect eyes in more challenging unconstrained datasets, spanning the EM spectrum. Additionally, a novel cross-spectral matching algorithm is introduced that attempts to bridge the gap between the visible and SWIR spectra. By fusing multiple photometric normalization combinations, the proposed algorithm is not only more efficient than other visible-SWIR matching algorithms, but more accurate in multiple challenging datasets. Finally, a novel pre-processing algorithm is discussed that bridges the gap between document (passport) and live face images. It is shown that the pre-processing scheme proposed, using inpainting and denoising techniques, significantly increases the cross-document face recognition performance

On Designing Tattoo Registration and Matching Approaches in the Visible and SWIR Bands

Face, iris and fingerprint based biometric systems are well explored areas of research. However, there are law enforcement and military applications where neither of the aforementioned modalities may be available to be exploited for human identification. In such applications, soft biometrics may be the only clue available that can be used for identification or verification purposes. Tattoo is an example of such a soft biometric trait. Unlike face-based biometric systems that used in both same-spectral and cross-spectral matching scenarios, tattoo-based human identification is still a not fully explored area of research. At this point in time there are no pre-processing, feature extraction and matching algorithms using tattoo images captured at multiple bands. This thesis is focused on exploring solutions on two main challenging problems. The first one is cross-spectral tattoo matching. The proposed algorithmic approach is using as an input raw Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) band tattoo images and matches them successfully against their visible band counterparts. The SWIR tattoo images are captured at 1100 nm, 1200 nm, 1300 nm, 1400 nm and 1500 nm. After an empirical study where multiple photometric normalization techniques were used to pre-process the original multi-band tattoo images, only one was determined to significantly improve cross spectral tattoo matching performance. The second challenging problem was to develop a fully automatic visible-based tattoo image registration system based on SIFT descriptors and the RANSAC algorithm with a homography model. The proposed automated registration approach significantly improves the operational cost of a tattoo image identification system (using large scale tattoo image datasets), where the alignment of a pair of tattoo images by system operators needs to be performed manually. At the same time, tattoo matching accuracy is also improved (before vs. after automated alignment) by 45.87% for the NIST-Tatt-C database and 12.65% for the WVU-Tatt database

A Distributed Weighted Voting Approach for Accurate Eye Center Estimation

This paper proposes a novel approach for accurate estimation of eye center in face images. A distributed voting based approach in which every pixel votes is adopted for potential eye center candidates. The votes are distributed over a subset of pixels which lie in a direction which is opposite to gradient direction and the weightage of votes is distributed according to a novel mechanism.  First, image is normalized to eliminate illumination variations and its edge map is generated using Canny edge detector. Distributed voting is applied on the edge image to generate different eye center candidates. Morphological closing and local maxima search are used to reduce the number of candidates. A classifier based on spatial and intensity information is used to choose the correct candidates for the locations of eye center. The proposed approach was tested on BioID face database and resulted in better Iris detection rate than the state-of-the-art. The proposed approach is robust against illumination variation, small pose variations, presence of eye glasses and partial occlusion of eyes.Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(3), pp.292-297, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.276

Self-supervised Multi-level Face Model Learning for Monocular Reconstruction at over 250 Hz

The reconstruction of dense 3D models of face geometry and appearance from a single image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To constrain the problem, many approaches rely on strong priors, such as parametric face models learned from limited 3D scan data. However, prior models restrict generalization of the true diversity in facial geometry, skin reflectance and illumination. To alleviate this problem, we present the first approach that jointly learns 1) a regressor for face shape, expression, reflectance and illumination on the basis of 2) a concurrently learned parametric face model. Our multi-level face model combines the advantage of 3D Morphable Models for regularization with the out-of-space generalization of a learned corrective space. We train end-to-end on in-the-wild images without dense annotations by fusing a convolutional encoder with a differentiable expert-designed renderer and a self-supervised training loss, both defined at multiple detail levels. Our approach compares favorably to the state-of-the-art in terms of reconstruction quality, better generalizes to real world faces, and runs at over 250 Hz.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Oral). Project webpage: https://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/FML

PCA-ANN Face Recognition System based on Photometric Normalization Techniques

The human face is the main focus of attention in social interaction, and is also the major key in conveying identity and emotion of a person. It has the appealing characteristic of not being intrusive as compared with other biometric techniques. The research works on face recognition started in the 1960s with the pioneering work of Bledsoe and Kanade, wh

Illumination tolerance in facial recognition

In this research work, five different preprocessing techniques were experimented with two different classifiers to find the best match for preprocessor + classifier combination to built an illumination tolerant face recognition system. Hence, a face recognition system is proposed based on illumination normalization techniques and linear subspace model using two distance metrics on three challenging, yet interesting databases. The databases are CAS PEAL database, the Extended Yale B database, and the AT&T database. The research takes the form of experimentation and analysis in which five illumination normalization techniques were compared and analyzed using two different distance metrics. The performances and execution times of the various techniques were recorded and measured for accuracy and efficiency. The illumination normalization techniques were Gamma Intensity Correction (GIC), discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Histogram Remapping using Normal distribution (HRN), Histogram Remapping using Log-normal distribution (HRL), and Anisotropic Smoothing technique (AS). The linear subspace models utilized were principal component analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The two distance metrics were Euclidean and Cosine distance. The result showed that for databases with both illumination (shadows), and lighting (over-exposure) variations like the CAS PEAL database the Histogram remapping technique with normal distribution produced excellent result when the cosine distance is used as the classifier. The result indicated 65% recognition rate in 15.8 ms/img. Alternatively for databases consisting of pure illumination variation, like the extended Yale B database, the Gamma Intensity Correction (GIC) merged with the Euclidean distance metric gave the most accurate result with 95.4% recognition accuracy in 1ms/img. It was further gathered from the set of experiments that the cosine distance produces more accurate result compared to the Euclidean distance metric. However the Euclidean distance is faster than the cosine distance in all the experiments conducted

State of the Art in Face Recognition

Notwithstanding the tremendous effort to solve the face recognition problem, it is not possible yet to design a face recognition system with a potential close to human performance. New computer vision and pattern recognition approaches need to be investigated. Even new knowledge and perspectives from different fields like, psychology and neuroscience must be incorporated into the current field of face recognition to design a robust face recognition system. Indeed, many more efforts are required to end up with a human like face recognition system. This book tries to make an effort to reduce the gap between the previous face recognition research state and the future state