Face recognition using multiple features in different color spaces

Face recognition as a particular problem of pattern recognition has been attracting substantial attention from researchers in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. The recent Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) program reveals that uncontrolled illumination conditions pose grand challenges to face recognition performance. Most of the existing face recognition methods use gray-scale face images, which have been shown insufficient to tackle these challenges. To overcome this challenging problem in face recognition, this dissertation applies multiple features derived from the color images instead of the intensity images only. First, this dissertation presents two face recognition methods, which operate in different color spaces, using frequency features by means of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and spatial features by means of Local Binary Patterns (LBP), respectively. The DFT frequency domain consists of the real part, the imaginary part, the magnitude, and the phase components, which provide the different interpretations of the input face images. The advantage of LBP in face recognition is attributed to its robustness in terms of intensity-level monotonic transformation, as well as its operation in the various scale image spaces. By fusing the frequency components or the multi-resolution LBP histograms, the complementary feature sets can be generated to enhance the capability of facial texture description. This dissertation thus uses the fused DFT and LBP features in two hybrid color spaces, the RIQ and the VIQ color spaces, respectively, for improving face recognition performance. Second, a method that extracts multiple features in the CID color space is presented for face recognition. As different color component images in the CID color space display different characteristics, three different image encoding methods, namely, the patch-based Gabor image representation, the multi-resolution LBP feature fusion, and the DCT-based multiple face encodings, are presented to effectively extract features from the component images for enhancing pattern recognition performance. To further improve classification performance, the similarity scores due to the three color component images are fused for the final decision making. Finally, a novel image representation is also discussed in this dissertation. Unlike a traditional intensity image that is directly derived from a linear combination of the R, G, and B color components, the novel image representation adapted to class separability is generated through a PCA plus FLD learning framework from the hybrid color space instead of the RGB color space. Based upon the novel image representation, a multiple feature fusion method is proposed to address the problem of face recognition under the severe illumination conditions. The aforementioned methods have been evaluated using two large-scale databases, namely, the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) version 2 database and the FERET face database. Experimental results have shown that the proposed methods improve face recognition performance upon the traditional methods using the intensity images by large margins and outperform some state-of-the-art methods

Face Video Competition

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01793-3_73Person recognition using facial features, e.g., mug-shot images, has long been used in identity documents. However, due to the widespread use of web-cams and mobile devices embedded with a camera, it is now possible to realise facial video recognition, rather than resorting to just still images. In fact, facial video recognition offers many advantages over still image recognition; these include the potential of boosting the system accuracy and deterring spoof attacks. This paper presents the first known benchmarking effort of person identity verification using facial video data. The evaluation involves 18 systems submitted by seven academic institutes.The work of NPoh is supported by the advanced researcher fellowship PA0022121477of the Swiss NSF; NPoh, CHC and JK by the EU-funded Mobio project grant IST-214324; NPC and HF by the EPSRC grants EP/D056942 and EP/D054818; VS andNP by the Slovenian national research program P2-0250(C) Metrology and Biomet-ric System, the COST Action 2101 and FP7-217762 HIDE; and, AAS by the Dutch BRICKS/BSIK project.Poh, N.; Chan, C.; Kittler, J.; Marcel, S.; Mc Cool, C.; Rua, E.; Alba Castro, J.... (2009). Face Video Competition. En Advances in Biometrics: Third International Conference, ICB 2009, Alghero, Italy, June 2-5, 2009. Proceedings. 715-724. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01793-3_73S715724Messer, K., Kittler, J., Sadeghi, M., Hamouz, M., Kostyn, A., Marcel, S., Bengio, S., Cardinaux, F., Sanderson, C., Poh, N., Rodriguez, Y., Kryszczuk, K., Czyz, J., Vandendorpe, L., Ng, J., Cheung, H., Tang, B.: Face authentication competition on the BANCA database. In: Zhang, D., Jain, A.K. (eds.) ICBA 2004. LNCS, vol. 3072, pp. 8–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Messer, K., Kittler, J., Sadeghi, M., Hamouz, M., Kostin, A., Cardinaux, F., Marcel, S., Bengio, S., Sanderson, C., Poh, N., Rodriguez, Y., Czyz, J., Vandendorpe, L., McCool, C., Lowther, S., Sridharan, S., Chandran, V., Palacios, R.P., Vidal, E., Bai, L., Shen, L.-L., Wang, Y., Yueh-Hsuan, C., Liu, H.-C., Hung, Y.-P., Heinrichs, A., Muller, M., Tewes, A., vd Malsburg, C., Wurtz, R., Wang, Z., Xue, F., Ma, Y., Yang, Q., Fang, C., Ding, X., Lucey, S., Goss, R., Schneiderman, H.: Face authentication test on the BANCA database. In: Int’l. Conf. Pattern Recognition (ICPR), vol. 4, pp. 523–532 (2004)Phillips, P.J., Flynn, P.J., Scruggs, T., Bowyer, K.W., Chang, J., Hoffman, K., Marques, J., Min, J., Worek, W.: Overview of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 947–954 (2005)Bailly-Baillière, E., Bengio, S., Bimbot, F., Hamouz, M., Kittler, J., Marithoz, J., Matas, J., Messer, K., Popovici, V., Porée, F., Ruiz, B., Thiran, J.-P.: The BANCA Database and Evaluation Protocol. In: Kittler, J., Nixon, M.S. (eds.) AVBPA 2003. LNCS, vol. 2688. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)Turk, M., Pentland, A.: Eigenfaces for Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3(1), 71–86 (1991)Martin, A., Doddington, G., Kamm, T., Ordowsk, M., Przybocki, M.: The DET Curve in Assessment of Detection Task Performance. In: Proc. Eurospeech 1997, Rhodes, pp. 1895–1898 (1997)Bengio, S., Marithoz, J.: The Expected Performance Curve: a New Assessment Measure for Person Authentication. In: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop (Odyssey), Toledo, pp. 279–284 (2004)Poh, N., Bengio, S.: Database, Protocol and Tools for Evaluating Score-Level Fusion Algorithms in Biometric Authentication. Pattern Recognition 39(2), 223–233 (2005)Martin, A., Przybocki, M., Campbell, J.P.: The NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Program, ch. 8. Springer, Heidelberg (2005

Selection and Combination of Local Gabor Classifiers for Robust Face Verification

Gabor features have been extensively used for facial image analysis due to their powerful representation capabilities. This paper focuses on selecting and combining multiple Gabor classifiers that are trained on, for example, different scales and local regions. The system exploits curvature Gabor features in addition to conventional Gabor features. Final classifier is obtained by combining selected classifiers using Sequential Forward Floating Search-based selection mechanism. In addition, we combine classifiers trained on different local representations at score-level by learning he weights with partial least square regression. The system is evaluated on Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) version 2.0 Experiment 4. The proposed system achieves 94.16% verification rate @ 0.1% FAR, which is the highest accuracy reported on this experiment so far in the literature

Enhancement of the Adaptive Shape Variants Average Values by Using Eight Movement Directions for Multi-Features Detection of Facial Sketch

This paper aims to detect multi features of a facial sketch by using a novel approach. The detection of multi features of facial sketch has been conducted by several researchers, but they mainly considered frontal face sketches as object samples. In fact, the detection of multi features of facial sketch with certain angle is very important to assist police for describing the criminal's face, when criminal's face only appears on certain angle. Integration of the maximum line gradient value enhancement and the level set methods was implemented to detect facial features sketches with tilt angle to 15 degrees. However, these methods tend to move towards non features when there are a lot of graffiti around the shape. To overcome this weakness, the author proposes a novel approach to move the shape by adding a parameter to control the movement based on enhancement of the adaptive shape variants average values with 8 movement directions. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the detection accuracy up to 92.74%

From Gabor Magnitude to Gabor Phase Features: Tackling the Problem of Face Recognition under Severe Illumination Changes

Among the numerous biometric systems presented in the literature, face recognition systems have received a great deal of attention in recent years. The main driving force in the development of these systems can be found in the enormous potential face recognition technology has in various application domains ranging from access control, human-machin

State Preserving Extreme Learning Machine for Face Recognition

Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) has been introduced as a new algorithm for training single hidden layer feed-forward neural networks (SLFNs) instead of the classical gradient-based algorithms. Based on the consistency property of data, which enforce similar samples to share similar properties, ELM is a biologically inspired learning algorithm with SLFNs that learns much faster with good generalization and performs well in classification applications. However, the random generation of the weight matrix in current ELM based techniques leads to the possibility of unstable outputs in the learning and testing phases. Therefore, we present a novel approach for computing the weight matrix in ELM which forms a State Preserving Extreme Leaning Machine (SPELM). The SPELM stabilizes ELM training and testing outputs while monotonically increases its accuracy by preserving state variables. Furthermore, three popular feature extraction techniques, namely Gabor, Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradients (PHOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) are incorporated with the SPELM for performance evaluation. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm yields the best performance on the widely used face datasets such as Yale, CMU and ORL compared to state-of-the-art ELM based classifiers

Investigation on advanced image search techniques

Content-based image search for retrieval of images based on the similarity in their visual contents, such as color, texture, and shape, to a query image is an active research area due to its broad applications. Color, for example, provides powerful information for image search and classification. This dissertation investigates advanced image search techniques and presents new color descriptors for image search and classification and robust image enhancement and segmentation methods for iris recognition. First, several new color descriptors have been developed for color image search. Specifically, a new oRGB-SIFT descriptor, which integrates the oRGB color space and the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), is proposed for image search and classification. The oRGB-SIFT descriptor is further integrated with other color SIFT features to produce the novel Color SIFT Fusion (CSF), the Color Grayscale SIFT Fusion (CGSF), and the CGSF+PHOG descriptors for image category search with applications to biometrics. Image classification is implemented using a novel EFM-KNN classifier, which combines the Enhanced Fisher Model (EFM) and the K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) decision rule. Experimental results on four large scale, grand challenge datasets have shown that the proposed oRGB-SIFT descriptor improves recognition performance upon other color SIFT descriptors, and the CSF, the CGSF, and the CGSF+PHOG descriptors perform better than the other color SIFT descriptors. The fusion of both Color SIFT descriptors (CSF) and Color Grayscale SIFT descriptor (CGSF) shows significant improvement in the classification performance, which indicates that various color-SIFT descriptors and grayscale-SIFT descriptor are not redundant for image search. Second, four novel color Local Binary Pattern (LBP) descriptors are presented for scene image and image texture classification. Specifically, the oRGB-LBP descriptor is derived in the oRGB color space. The other three color LBP descriptors, namely, the Color LBP Fusion (CLF), the Color Grayscale LBP Fusion (CGLF), and the CGLF+PHOG descriptors, are obtained by integrating the oRGB-LBP descriptor with some additional image features. Experimental results on three large scale, grand challenge datasets have shown that the proposed descriptors can improve scene image and image texture classification performance. Finally, a new iris recognition method based on a robust iris segmentation approach is presented for improving iris recognition performance. The proposed robust iris segmentation approach applies power-law transformations for more accurate detection of the pupil region, which significantly reduces the candidate limbic boundary search space for increasing detection accuracy and efficiency. As the limbic circle, which has a center within a close range of the pupil center, is selectively detected, the eyelid detection approach leads to improved iris recognition performance. Experiments using the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) database show the effectiveness of the proposed method

Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering

Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science, engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie