Face Recognition: Issues, Methods and Alternative Applications

Face recognition, as one of the most successful applications of image analysis, has recently gained significant attention. It is due to availability of feasible technologies, including mobile solutions. Research in automatic face recognition has been conducted since the 1960s, but the problem is still largely unsolved. Last decade has provided significant progress in this area owing to advances in face modelling and analysis techniques. Although systems have been developed for face detection and tracking, reliable face recognition still offers a great challenge to computer vision and pattern recognition researchers. There are several reasons for recent increased interest in face recognition, including rising public concern for security, the need for identity verification in the digital world, face analysis and modelling techniques in multimedia data management and computer entertainment. In this chapter, we have discussed face recognition processing, including major components such as face detection, tracking, alignment and feature extraction, and it points out the technical challenges of building a face recognition system. We focus on the importance of the most successful solutions available so far. The final part of the chapter describes chosen face recognition methods and applications and their potential use in areas not related to face recognition

Face Detection & Recognition based on Fusion of Omnidirectional & PTZ Vision Sensors and Heteregenous Database

International audienceLarge field of view with high resolution has always been sought-after for Mobile Robotic Authentication. So the Vision System proposed here is composed of a catadioptric sensor for full range monitoring and a Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) camera together forming an innovative sensor, able to detect and track any moving objects at a higher zoom level. In our application, the catadioptric sensor is calibrated and used to detect and track Regions Of Iinterest (ROIs) within its 360 degree Field Of View (FOV), especially face regions. Using a joint calibration strategy, the PTZ camera parameters are automatically adjusted by the system in order to detect and track the face ROI within a higher resolution and project the same in faces-pace for recognition via Eigenface algorithm. Face recognition is one important task in Nomad Biometric Authentication (NOBA 1) project. However, as many other face databases, it will easily produce the Small Sample Size (SSS) problem in some applications with NOBA data. Thus this journal uses the compressed sensing (CS) algorithm to solve the SSS problem in NOBA face database. Some experiments can prove the feasibility and validity of this solution. The whole development has been partially validated by application to the Face recognition using our own database NOBA

Distortion Robust Biometric Recognition

abstract: Information forensics and security have come a long way in just a few years thanks to the recent advances in biometric recognition. The main challenge remains a proper design of a biometric modality that can be resilient to unconstrained conditions, such as quality distortions. This work presents a solution to face and ear recognition under unconstrained visual variations, with a main focus on recognition in the presence of blur, occlusion and additive noise distortions. First, the dissertation addresses the problem of scene variations in the presence of blur, occlusion and additive noise distortions resulting from capture, processing and transmission. Despite their excellent performance, ’deep’ methods are susceptible to visual distortions, which significantly reduce their performance. Sparse representations, on the other hand, have shown huge potential capabilities in handling problems, such as occlusion and corruption. In this work, an augmented SRC (ASRC) framework is presented to improve the performance of the Spare Representation Classifier (SRC) in the presence of blur, additive noise and block occlusion, while preserving its robustness to scene dependent variations. Different feature types are considered in the performance evaluation including image raw pixels, HoG and deep learning VGG-Face. The proposed ASRC framework is shown to outperform the conventional SRC in terms of recognition accuracy, in addition to other existing sparse-based methods and blur invariant methods at medium to high levels of distortion, when particularly used with discriminative features. In order to assess the quality of features in improving both the sparsity of the representation and the classification accuracy, a feature sparse coding and classification index (FSCCI) is proposed and used for feature ranking and selection within both the SRC and ASRC frameworks. The second part of the dissertation presents a method for unconstrained ear recognition using deep learning features. The unconstrained ear recognition is performed using transfer learning with deep neural networks (DNNs) as a feature extractor followed by a shallow classifier. Data augmentation is used to improve the recognition performance by augmenting the training dataset with image transformations. The recognition performance of the feature extraction models is compared with an ensemble of fine-tuned networks. The results show that, in the case where long training time is not desirable or a large amount of data is not available, the features from pre-trained DNNs can be used with a shallow classifier to give a comparable recognition accuracy to the fine-tuned networks.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Palmprint identification using an ensemble of sparse representations

Among various palmprint identification methods proposed in the literature, sparse representation for classification (SRC) is very attractive offering high accuracy. Although SRC has good discriminative ability, its performance strongly depends on the quality of the training data. In particular, SRC suffers from two major problems: lack of training samples per class and large intra-class variations. In fact, palmprint images not only contain identity information but they also have other information, such as illumination and geometrical distortions due to the unconstrained conditions and the movement of the hand. In this case, the sparse representation assumption may not hold well in the original space since samples from different classes may be considered from the same class. This paper aims to enhance palmprint identification performance through SRC by proposing a simple yet efficient method based on an ensemble of sparse representations through an ensemble of discriminative dictionaries satisfying SRC assumption. The ensemble learning has the advantage to reduce the sensitivity due to the limited size of the training data and is performed based on random subspace sampling over 2D-PCA space while keeping the image inherent structure and information. In order to obtain discriminative dictionaries satisfying SRC assumption, a new space is learned by minimizing and maximizing the intra-class and inter-class variations using 2D-LDA. Extensive experiments are conducted on two publicly available palmprint data sets: multispectral and PolyU. Obtained results showed very promising results compared with both state-of-the-art holistic and coding methods. Besides these findings, we provide an empirical analysis of the parameters involved in the proposed technique to guide the neophyte. 2018 IEEE.This work was supported by the National Priority Research Program from the Qatar National Research Fund under Grant 6-249-1-053. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Qatar National Research Fund or Qatar University.Scopu

Side information in robust principal component analysis: algorithms and applications

Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) aims at recovering a low-rank subspace from grossly corrupted high-dimensional (often visual) data and is a cornerstone in many machine learning and computer vision applications. Even though RPCA has been shown to be very successful in solving many rank minimisation problems, there are still cases where degenerate or suboptimal solutions are obtained. This is likely to be remedied by taking into account of domain-dependent prior knowledge. In this paper, we propose two models for the RPCA problem with the aid of side information on the low-rank structure of the data. The versatility of the proposed methods is demonstrated by applying them to four applications, namely background subtraction, facial image denoising, face and facial expression recognition. Experimental results on synthetic and five real world datasets indicate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed methods on these application domains, largely outperforming six previous approaches