Gabor Feature Based Classification Using 2D Linear Discriminant Analysis for Face Recognition

This paper presents a novel Gabor-based kernel Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method by integrating the Gabor wavelet representation of face images and the kernel PCA method for face recognition. Gabor wavelets first derive desirable facial features characterized by spatial frequency, spatial locality, and orientation selectivity to cope with the variations due to illumination and facial expression changes. The kernel PCA method is then extended to include fractional power polynomial models for enhanced face recognition performance. A fractional power polynomial, however, does not necessarily define a kernel function, as it might not define a positive semidefinite Gram matrix. Note that the sigmoid kernels, one of the three classes of widely used kernel functions (polynomial kernels, Gaussian kernels, and sigmoid kernels), do not actually define a positive semidefinite Gram matrix either. Nevertheless, the sigmoid kernels have been successfully used in practice, such as in building support vector machines. In order to derive real kernel PCA features, we apply only those kernel PCA eigenvectors that are associated with positive eigenvalues. The feasibility of the Gabor-based kernel PCA method with fractional power polynomial models has been successfully tested on both frontal and pose-angled face recognition, using two data sets from the FERET database and the CMU PIE database, respectively. The FERET data set contains 600 frontal face images of 200 subjects, while the PIE data set consists of 680 images across five poses (left and right profiles, left and right half profiles, and frontal view) with two different facial expressions (neutral and smiling) of 68 subjects. The effectiveness of the Gabor-based kernel PCA method with fractional power polynomial models is shown in terms of both absolute performance indices and comparative performance against the PCA method, the kernel PCA method with polynomial kernels, the kernel PCA method with fractional power polynomial models, the Gabor wavelet-based PCA method, and the Gabor wavelet-based kernel PCA method with polynomial kernels.

This paper presents a novel face recognition method by integrating the Gabor wavelet representation of face images and the enhanced powerful discriminator, complete Kernel Fisher Discriminant (CKFD) with fractional power polynomial (FPP) models. The novelty of this paper comes from (1) Gabor wavelet, is employed to extract desirable facial features characterized by spatial frequency, spatial locality and orientation selectivity to cope with the variations in illumination and facial expressions, which improves the recognition performance; (2) a recently proposed powerful discriminator, namely CKFD, which enhances its discriminating ability using two kinds of discriminant information (i.e., regular and irregular information), is employed to classify the Gabor features; (3) the FPP models, are employed to CKFD analysis to enhance the discriminating ability. Comparing with existing principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, kernel principal component analysis, KFD and CKFD methods, the proposed method gives the superior results with the ORL, Yale and UMIST face databases.

A novel Gabor-Kernel face recognition method is proposed in this paper. This involves convolving a face image with a series of Gabor wavelets at different scales, locations, and orientations and extracting features from resulting Gabor filtered images. kernel discriminant analysis (KDDA) is then applied to the feature vectors for dimension reduction as well as class separability enhancement. A database of 600 frontal-view face images from the FERET face database is used to test the method. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of KDDA over other Kernel methods such as kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and general discriminant analysis (GDA). Significant improvements are also observed when features are extracted from Gabor filtered images instead of the original images. A 94% accuracy has been observed for the novel Gabor + KDDA method on the FERET database using a simple classifier, which could be further improved by employing a more complex classifier and distance measurer.

Bilateral two-dimensional locality preserving projection (B2DLPP) is an effective method for unsupervised linear dimensionality reduction, which directly extracts face features from image matrices based on locality criterion. Motivated by B2DLPP, this paper proposes a supervised bilateral two-dimensional locality preserving projection (SB2DLPP). Different from B2DLPP, the proposed method takes into account the class information when constructing the similarity matrix. It increases inter-class distance in the projection space so that better right and left-projection matrices are obtained. Furthermore, a Gabor-based supervised bilateral two-dimensional locality preserving projection method is proposed for face recognition. Gabor wavelet representations are adopted for face images to make the proposed method robust to illumination variations and facial expression changes. Then, SB2DLPP is applied to reduce feature dimension. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared with other traditional face recognition schemes on the FERET, Yale and JAFFE databases. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

A bi-modal face recognition framework integrating facial expression with facial appearance

Tuning functions for automatic detection of brief changes of facial expression in the human brain

We propose a novel method to improve the performance of existing three dimensional (3D) human face recognition algorithms that employ Euclidean distances between facial fiducial points as features. We further investigate a novel 3D face recognition algorithm that employs geodesic and Euclidean distances between facial fiducial points. We demonstrate that this algorithm is robust to changes in facial expression. Geodesic and Euclidean distances were calculated between pairs of 25 facial fiducial points. For the proposed algorithm, geodesic distances and 'global curvature' characteristics, defined as the ratio of geodesic to Euclidean distance between a pairs of points, were employed as features. The most discriminatory features were selected using stepwise linear discriminant analysis (LDA). These were projected onto 11 LDA directions, and face models were matched using the Euclidean distance metric. With a gallery set containing one image each of 105 subjects and a probe set containing 663 images of the same subjects, the algorithm produced EER=1.4% and a rank 1 RR=98.64%. It performed significantly better than existing algorithms based on principal component analysis and LDA applied to face range images. Its verification performance for expressive faces was also significantly better than an algorithm that employed Euclidean distances between facial fiducial points as features.

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Multilinear Principal Component Analysis (MPCA) are leading subspace methods for achieving dimension reduction based on supervised learning. Both LDA and MPCA use class labels of data samples to calculate subspaces onto which these samples are projected. Furthermore, both methods have been successfully applied to face recognition. Although LDA and MPCA share common goals and methodologies, in previous research they have been applied separately and independently. In this paper, we propose an extension of LDA to multiple factor frameworks. Our proposed method, Multifactor Discriminant Analysis, aims to obtain multilinear projections that maximize the between-class scatter while minimizing the withinclass scatter, which is the same core fundamental objective of LDA. Moreover, Multifactor Discriminant Analysis (MDA), like MPCA, uses multifactor analysis and calculates subject parameters that represent the characteristics of subjects and are invariant to other changes, such as viewpoints or lighting conditions. In this way, our proposed MDA combines the best virtues of both LDA and MPCA for face recognition.

In this paper, a robust face recognition algorithm is proposed, which is based on the elastic graph matching (EGM) and discriminative feature analysis algorithm. We introduce a cost function for the EGM taking account of variations in face pose and facial expressions, and propose its optimization procedure. Our proposed cost function uses a set of Gabor-wavelet-based features, called robust jet, which are robust against the variations. The robust jet is defined in terms of discrete Fourier transform coefficients of Gabor coefficients. To cope with the difference between face poses of test face and reference faces, 2 x 2 warping matrix is incorporated in the proposed cost function. For the discriminative feature analysis, linear projection discriminant analysis and kernel-based projection discriminant analysis are introduced. These methods are motivated to solve the small-size problem of training samples. The basic idea of PDA is that a class is represented by a subspace spanned by some training samples of the class instead of using sample mean vector, that the distance from a pattern to a class is defined by using the error vector between the pattern and its projection to the subspace representing the class, and that an optimum feature selection rule is developed using the distance concept in a similar way as in the conventional linear discriminant analysis. In order to evaluate the performance of our face recognition algorithm, we carried out some experiments using the well-known FERET face database, and compared the performance with recently developed approaches. We observed that our algorithm outperformed the compared approaches.

Over the course of the last decade, infrared (IR) and particularly thermal IR imaging based face recognition has emerged as a promising complement to conventional, visible spectrum based approaches which continue to struggle when applied in the real world. While inherently insensitive to visible spectrum illumination changes, IR images introduce specific challenges of their own, most notably sensitivity to factors which affect facial heat emission patterns, e.g. emotional state, ambient temperature, and alcohol intake. In addition, facial expression and pose changes are more difficult to correct in IR images because they are less rich in high frequency detail which is an important cue for fitting any deformable model. In this paper we describe a novel method which addresses these major challenges. Specifically, to normalize for pose and facial expression changes we generate a synthetic frontal image of a face in a canonical, neutral facial expression from an image of the face in an arbitrary pose and facial expression. This is achieved by piecewise affine warping which follows active appearance model (AAM) fitting. This is the first publication which explores the use of an AAM on thermal IR images; we propose a pre-processing step which enhances detail in thermal images, making AAM convergence faster and more accurate. To overcome the problem of thermal IR image sensitivity to the exact pattern of facial temperature emissions we describe a representation based on reliable anatomical features. In contrast to previous approaches, our representation is not binary; rather, our method accounts for the reliability of the extracted features. This makes the proposed representation much more robust both to pose and scale changes. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on the largest public database of thermal IR images of faces on which it achieved 100% identification rate, significantly outperforming previously described methods.

Whether the brain represents facial expressions as perceptual continua or as emotion categories remains controversial. Here, we measured the neural response to morphed images to directly address how facial expressions of emotion are represented in the brain. We found that face-selective regions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the amygdala responded selectively to changes in facial expression, independent of changes in identity. We then asked whether the responses in these regions reflected categorical or continuous neural representations of facial expression. Participants viewed images from continua generated by morphing between faces posing different expressions such that the expression could be the same, could involve a physical change but convey the same emotion, or could differ by the same physical amount but be perceived as two different emotions. We found that the posterior superior temporal sulcus was equally sensitive to all changes in facial expression, consistent with a continuous representation. In contrast, the amygdala was only sensitive to changes in expression that altered the perceived emotion, demonstrating a more categorical representation. These results offer a resolution to the controversy about how facial expression is processed in the brain by showing that both continuous and categorical representations underlie our ability to extract this important social cue.

This paper develops a novel face recognition technique called Complete Gabor Fisher Classifier (CGFC). Different from existing techniques that use Gabor filters for deriving the Gabor face representation, the proposed approach does not rely solely on Gabor magnitude information but effectively uses features computed based on Gabor phase information as well. It represents one of the few successful attempts found in the literature of combining Gabor magnitude and phase information for robust face recognition. The novelty of the proposed CGFC technique comes from (1) the introduction of a Gabor phase-based face representation and (2) the combination of the recognition technique using the proposed representation with classical Gabor magnitude-based methods into a unified framework. The proposed face recognition framework is assessed in a series of face verification and identification experiments performed on the XM2VTS, Extended YaleB, FERET, and AR databases. The results of the assessment suggest that the proposed technique clearly outperforms state-of-the-art face recognition techniques from the literature and that its performance is almost unaffected by the presence of partial occlusions of the facial area, changes in facial expression, or severe illumination changes. 1.

A novel system for 3D face recognition is presented in this paper. Firstly, we reduce the noise and move spikes from all the 3D faces. Secondly, we use Iterative Closet Point (ICP) to align all 3D face with the first person, and then for each face, we find the nose tip. Once the nose tip is successfully found, we crop a region, which is defined by a sphere radius of 100 mm centered at the nose tip. Depth image are constructed using the region subsequently. Then the depth image is projected into Gabor-based Supervised Locality Sensitive Discriminant Analysis (GISLSDA) space, which is improved by Gabor wavelet and Two-Directional Two Dimensions Principal Component Analysis (2D <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> PCA). Recognition is achieved by using a Nearest Neighbor (NN) classifier finally. This method is robust to changes in facial expressions and poses. The experimental results show that the new algorithm outperforms the other popular approaches reported in the literature and achieves much higher accurate recognition rate.

This paper presents a novel face recognition method by using the new image representations. While the commonly used gray-scale image is derived from the linear combination of R, G, and B color component images, the new image representations are derived from the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) tranform upon the hybrid configurations of different color component images. Compared to the correlated color space RGB, the correlations in other configurations of color components (such as RCrQ, YIQ, YCbQ, and so on) are reduced and hence the diversities among their misclassification outputs are enhanced. The new image representations, which inherit advantages from all the individual color components, are thus more invariable than the gray-scale image to the image variations for the face recognition task. Furthermore, we propose to encode the facial information from the new image representations by using an effective Local Binary Pattern (LBP) feature extraction method, which extracts and fuses the multi-resolution LBP features. Finally, the resulting LBP features undergo the Fisher discriminant analysis for face recognition. The most challenging Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) version 2 Experiment 4 shows the proposed method, which achieves the face verification rate of 83.41% at the false accept rate of 0.1%, performs better than some recent face recognition methods.

This work presents a model-based face recognition approach that uses a hierarchical Gabor wavelet representation and flexible neural network matching. The representation of local features is based on the Gabor wavelets transform of a number of scales and a number of orientations. The Gabor wavelet representation is used in a innovative self-organization flexible neural network matching approach that can provide robust recognition. The sparse centers of Gabor wavelets in the images and neurons placement are arranged according to the hexagonal grids. Neural network matching between the model and the input image is to find out the exact correspondence of local features and to map the model to the input image based on local similarity and neighborhood grouping of local features. Experimental results in recognizing faces that includes the variations of translation, rotation in plane, rotation in depth, and slightly changes of facial expressions are also presented.