3D FACE RECOGNITION USING LOCAL FEATURE BASED METHODS

Face recognition has attracted many researchers’ attention compared to other biometrics due to its non-intrusive and friendly nature. Although several methods for 2D face recognition have been proposed so far, there are still some challenges related to the 2D face including illumination, pose variation, and facial expression. In the last few decades, 3D face research area has become more interesting since shape and geometry information are used to handle challenges from 2D faces. Existing algorithms for face recognition are divided into three different categories: holistic feature-based, local feature-based, and hybrid methods. According to the literature, local features have shown better performance relative to holistic feature-based methods under expression and occlusion challenges. In this dissertation, local feature-based methods for 3D face recognition have been studied and surveyed. In the survey, local methods are classified into three broad categories which consist of keypoint-based, curve-based, and local surface-based methods. Inspired by keypoint-based methods which are effective to handle partial occlusion, structural context descriptor on pyramidal shape maps and texture image has been proposed in a multimodal scheme. Score-level fusion is used to combine keypoints’ matching score in both texture and shape modalities. The survey shows local surface-based methods are efficient to handle facial expression. Accordingly, a local derivative pattern is introduced to extract distinct features from depth map in this work. In addition, the local derivative pattern is applied on surface normals. Most 3D face recognition algorithms are focused to utilize the depth information to detect and extract features. Compared to depth maps, surface normals of each point can determine the facial surface orientation, which provides an efficient facial surface representation to extract distinct features for recognition task. An Extreme Learning Machine (ELM)-based auto-encoder is used to make the feature space more discriminative. Expression and occlusion robust analysis using the information from the normal maps are investigated by dividing the facial region into patches. A novel hybrid classifier is proposed to combine Sparse Representation Classifier (SRC) and ELM classifier in a weighted scheme. The proposed algorithms have been evaluated on four widely used 3D face databases; FRGC, Bosphorus, Bu-3DFE, and 3D-TEC. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The main contribution of this work lies in identification and analysis of effective local features and a classification method for improving 3D face recognition performance

Facial Expression Analysis under Partial Occlusion: A Survey

Automatic machine-based Facial Expression Analysis (FEA) has made substantial progress in the past few decades driven by its importance for applications in psychology, security, health, entertainment and human computer interaction. The vast majority of completed FEA studies are based on non-occluded faces collected in a controlled laboratory environment. Automatic expression recognition tolerant to partial occlusion remains less understood, particularly in real-world scenarios. In recent years, efforts investigating techniques to handle partial occlusion for FEA have seen an increase. The context is right for a comprehensive perspective of these developments and the state of the art from this perspective. This survey provides such a comprehensive review of recent advances in dataset creation, algorithm development, and investigations of the effects of occlusion critical for robust performance in FEA systems. It outlines existing challenges in overcoming partial occlusion and discusses possible opportunities in advancing the technology. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first FEA survey dedicated to occlusion and aimed at promoting better informed and benchmarked future work.Comment: Authors pre-print of the article accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys (accepted on 02-Nov-2017

Sparse MDMO: learning a discriminative feature for micro-expression recognition

Micro-expressions are the rapid movements of facial muscles that can be used to reveal concealed emotions. Recognizing them from video clips has a wide range of applications and receives increasing attention recently. Among existing methods, the main directional mean optical-flow (MDMO) feature achieves state-of-the-art performance for recognizing spontaneous micro-expressions. For a video clip, the MDMO feature is computed by averaging a set of atomic features frame-by-frame. Despite its simplicity, the average operation in MDMO can easily lose the underlying manifold structure inherent in the feature space. In this paper we propose a sparse MDMO feature that learns an effective dictionary from a micro-expression video dataset. In particular, a new distance metric is proposed based on the sparsity of sample points in the MDMO feature space, which can efficiently reveal the underlying manifold structure. The proposed sparse MDMO feature is obtained by incorporating this new metric into the classic graph regularized sparse coding (GraphSC) scheme. We evaluate sparse MDMO and four representative features (LBP-TOP, STCLQP, MDMO and FDM) on three spontaneous micro-expression datasets (SMIC, CASME and CASME II). The results show that sparse MDMO outperforms these representative features

Face Recognition Using Completed Local Ternary Pattern (CLTP) Texture Descriptor

Nowadays, face recognition becomes one of the important topics in the computer vision and image processing area. This is due to its importance where can be used in many applications. The main key in the face recognition is how to extract distinguishable features from the image to perform high recognition accuracy.  Local binary pattern (LBP) and many of its variants used as texture features in many of face recognition systems. Although LBP performed well in many fields, it is sensitive to noise, and different patterns of LBP may classify into the same class that reduces its discriminating property. Completed Local Ternary Pattern (CLTP) is one of the new proposed texture features to overcome the drawbacks of the LBP. The CLTP outperformed LBP and some of its variants in many fields such as texture, scene, and event image classification.  In this study, we study and investigate the performance of CLTP operator for face recognition task. The Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE), and FEI face databases are used in the experiments. In the experimental results, CLTP outperformed some previous texture descriptors and achieves higher classification rate for face recognition task which has reached up 99.38% and 85.22% in JAFFE and FEI, respectively

A survey of face recognition techniques under occlusion

The limited capacity to recognize faces under occlusions is a long-standing problem that presents a unique challenge for face recognition systems and even for humans. The problem regarding occlusion is less covered by research when compared to other challenges such as pose variation, different expressions, etc. Nevertheless, occluded face recognition is imperative to exploit the full potential of face recognition for real-world applications. In this paper, we restrict the scope to occluded face recognition. First, we explore what the occlusion problem is and what inherent difficulties can arise. As a part of this review, we introduce face detection under occlusion, a preliminary step in face recognition. Second, we present how existing face recognition methods cope with the occlusion problem and classify them into three categories, which are 1) occlusion robust feature extraction approaches, 2) occlusion aware face recognition approaches, and 3) occlusion recovery based face recognition approaches. Furthermore, we analyze the motivations, innovations, pros and cons, and the performance of representative approaches for comparison. Finally, future challenges and method trends of occluded face recognition are thoroughly discussed