A fast and accurate algorithm for facial feature segmentation

Abstrac

Component-based face recognition.

Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.Component-based automatic face recognition has been of interest to a growing number of researchers in the past fifteen years. However, the main challenge remains the automatic extraction of facial components for recognition in different face orientations without any human intervention; or any assumption on the location of these components. In this work, we investigate a solution to this problem. Facial components: eyes, nose, and mouth are firstly detected in different orientations of face. To ensure that the components detected are appropriate for recognition, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifer is applied to identify facial components that have been accurately detected. Thereafter, features are extracted from the correctly detected components by Gabor Filters and Zernike Moments combined. Gabor Filters are used to extract the texture characteristics of the eyes and Zernike Moments are applied to compute the shape characteristics of the nose and the mouth. The texture and the shape features are concatenated and normalized to build the final feature vector of the input face image. Experiments show that our feature extraction strategy is robust, it also provides a more compact representation of face images and achieves an average recognition rate of 95% in different face orientations