Title: A method towards face recognition

Authors: Lin Huang, Hanqi Zhuang, Salvatore D. Morgera

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA. ' Department of Electrical Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA. ' Department of Electrical Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA

Abstract: This paper proposes and analyses the pyramidal Gabor eigenface (PGE) algorithm for face recognition. It can be realised directly in the spatial domain by using one-dimensional (1D) filter masks to extract the Gabor facial features. This is in contrast to the two-dimensional (2D) Fourier implementation that must be applied in both frequency and spatial domains in the general 2D Gabor-based facial feature extraction methods. Eigenface decomposition is then used to further reduce the redundancy of these face features. Because, Gabor features are characterised by strong spatial locality with scale and orientation selectivity, they can cope with variation problems due to illumination, facial expression change and orientation. Eigenface cannot handle such variations. The analysis of the algorithm and the experimental results using AT&T (formally Olivetti) face database show that the cost of the algorithm and the number of Gabor features in the PGE algorithm are significantly lower than the ones in the classic 2D Gabor wavelet-based methods and have better recognition results.

Keywords: computational cost; face recognition; Fourier transform; pyramidal Gabor wavelets; 2D Gabor wavelet; facial features; feature extraction; facial expressions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2009.027110

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2009 Vol.7 No.3, pp.282 - 295

Published online: 15 Jul 2009 *

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