Illumination and Expression Invariant Face Recognition With One Sample Image

Most face recognition approaches either assume constant lighting condition or standard facial expressions, thus cannot deal with both kinds of variations simultaneously. This problem becomes more serious in applications when only one sample image per class is available. In this paper, we present a linear pattern classification algorithm, Adaptive Principal Component Analysis (APCA), which first applies PCA to construct a subspace for image representation; then warps the subspace according to the within-class covariance and between-class covariance of samples to improve class separability. This technique performed well under variations in lighting conditions. To produce insensitivity to expressions, we rotate the subspace before warping in order to enhance the representativeness of features. This method is evaluated on the Asian Face Image Database. Experiments show that APCA outperforms PCA and other methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and generalization ability

Illumination and Expression Invariant Face Recognition: Toward Sample Quality-based Adaptive Fusion

The performance of face recognition schemes is adversely affected as a result of significant to moderate variation in illumination, pose, and facial expressions. Most existing approaches to face recognition tend to deal with one of these problems by controlling the other conditions. Beside strong efficiency requirements, face recognition systems on constrained mobile devices and PDA's are expected to be robust against all variations in recording conditions that arise naturally as a result of the way such devices are used. Wavelet-based face recognition schemes have been shown to meet well the efficiency requirements. Wavelet transforms decompose face images into different frequency subbands at different scales, each giving rise to different representation of the face, and thereby providing the ingredients for a multi-stream approach to face recognition which stand a real chance of achieving acceptable level of robustness. This paper is concerned with the best fusion strategy for a multi-stream face recognition scheme. By investigating the robustness of different wavelet subbands against variation in lighting conditions and expressions, we shall demonstrate the shortcomings of current non-adaptive fusion strategies and argue for the need to develop an image quality based, intelligent, dynamic fusion strategy

Geometry-Aware Face Completion and Editing

Face completion is a challenging generation task because it requires generating visually pleasing new pixels that are semantically consistent with the unmasked face region. This paper proposes a geometry-aware Face Completion and Editing NETwork (FCENet) by systematically studying facial geometry from the unmasked region. Firstly, a facial geometry estimator is learned to estimate facial landmark heatmaps and parsing maps from the unmasked face image. Then, an encoder-decoder structure generator serves to complete a face image and disentangle its mask areas conditioned on both the masked face image and the estimated facial geometry images. Besides, since low-rank property exists in manually labeled masks, a low-rank regularization term is imposed on the disentangled masks, enforcing our completion network to manage occlusion area with various shape and size. Furthermore, our network can generate diverse results from the same masked input by modifying estimated facial geometry, which provides a flexible mean to edit the completed face appearance. Extensive experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that our network is able to generate visually pleasing face completion results and edit face attributes as well

Person Location Service on the Planetary Sensor Network

This paper gives a prototype application which can provide a person location service on the IrisNet. Two crucial technologies face detection and face recognition underpinning such image and video data mining service are explained. For the face detection, authors use 4 types of simple rectangles as features, Adaboost as the learning algorithm to select the important features for classification, and finally generate a cascade of classifiers which is extremely fast on the face detection task. As for the face recognition, the authors develop Adaptive Principle Components Analysis (APCA) to improve the robustness of principal Components Analysis (PCA) to nuisance factors such as lighting and expression. APCA also can recognize faces from single face which is suitable in a data mining situatio

Robust Face Recognition in Rotated Eigen Space

Face recognition is a very complex classification problem due to nuisance variations in different conditions. Most face recognition approaches either assume constant lighting condition or standard facial expressions, thus cannot deal with both kinds of variations simultaneously. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) cannot handle complex pattern variations such as illumination and expression. Adaptive PCA rotates eigenspace to extract more representative features thus improving the performance. In this paper, we present a way to extract various sets of features by different eigenspace rotations and propose a method to fuse these features to generate nonorthogonal mappings for face recognition. The proposed method is tested on the Asian Face Database with 856 images from 107 subjects with 5 lighting conditions and 4 expressions. We register only one normally lit neutral face image and test on the remaining face images with variations. Experiments show a 95% classification accuracy and a 20% reduction in error rate. This illustrates that the fused features can provide significantly improved pattern classification

Robust Face Recognition for Data Mining

While the technology for mining text documents in large databases could be said to be relatively mature, the same cannot be said for mining other important data types such as speech, music, images and video. Yet these forms of multimedia data are becoming increasingly prevalent on the internet and intranets as bandwidth rapidly increases due to continuing advances in computing hardware and consumer demand. An emerging major problem is the lack of accurate and efficient tools to query these multimedia data directly, so we are usually forced to rely on available metadata such as manual labeling. Currently the most effective way to label data to allow for searching of multimedia archives is for humans to physically review the material. This is already uneconomic or, in an increasing number of application areas, quite impossible because these data are being collected much faster than any group of humans could meaningfully label them - and the pace is accelerating, forming a veritable explosion of non-text data. Some driver applications are emerging from heightened security demands in the 21st century, postproduction of digital interactive television, and the recent deployment of a planetary sensor network overlaid on the internet backbone

Image quality-based adaptive illumination normalisation for face recognition

Automatic face recognition is a challenging task due to intra-class variations. Changes in lighting conditions during enrolment and identification stages contribute significantly to these intra-class variations. A common approach to address the effects such of varying conditions is to pre-process the biometric samples in order normalise intra-class variations. Histogram equalisation is a widely used illumination normalisation technique in face recognition. However, a recent study has shown that applying histogram equalisation on well-lit face images could lead to a decrease in recognition accuracy. This paper presents a dynamic approach to illumination normalisation, based on face image quality. The quality of a given face image is measured in terms of its luminance distortion by comparing this image against a known reference face image. Histogram equalisation is applied to a probe image if its luminance distortion is higher than a predefined threshold. We tested the proposed adaptive illumination normalisation method on the widely used Extended Yale Face Database B. Identification results demonstrate that our adaptive normalisation produces better identification accuracy compared to the conventional approach where every image is normalised, irrespective of the lighting condition they were acquired

Learning Local Features Using Boosted Trees for Face Recognition

Face recognition is fundamental to a number of significant applications that include but not limited to video surveillance and content based image retrieval. Some of the challenges which make this task difficult are variations in faces due to changes in pose, illumination and deformation. This dissertation proposes a face recognition system to overcome these difficulties. We propose methods for different stages of face recognition which will make the system more robust to these variations. We propose a novel method to perform skin segmentation which is fast and able to perform well under different illumination conditions. We also propose a method to transform face images from any given lighting condition to a reference lighting condition using color constancy. Finally we propose methods to extract local features and train classifiers using these features. We developed two algorithms using these local features, modular PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and boosted tree. We present experimental results which show local features improve recognition accuracy when compared to accuracy of methods which use global features. The boosted tree algorithm recursively learns a tree of strong classifiers by splitting the training data in to smaller sets. We apply this method to learn features on the intrapersonal and extra-personal feature space. Once trained each node of the boosted tree will be a strong classifier. We used this method with Gabor features to perform experiments on benchmark face databases. Results clearly show that the proposed method has better face recognition and verification accuracy than the traditional AdaBoost strong classifier