This paper introduces a novel Gabor-Fisher (1936) classifier (GFC) for face recognition. The GFC method, which is robust to changes in illumination and facial expression, applies the enhanced Fisher linear discriminant model (EFM) to an augmented Gabor feature vector derived from the Gabor wavelet representation of face images. The novelty of this paper comes from 1) the derivation of an augmented Gabor feature vector, whose dimensionality is further reduced using the EFM by considering both data compression and recognition (generalization) performance; 2) the development of a Gabor-Fisher classifier for multi-class problems; and 3) extensive performance evaluation studies. In particular, we performed comparative studies of different similarity measures applied to various classifiers. We also performed comparative experimental studies of various face recognition schemes, including our novel GFC method, the Gabor wavelet method, the eigenfaces method, the Fisherfaces method, the EFM method, the combination of Gabor and the eigenfaces method, and the combination of Gabor and the Fisherfaces method. The feasibility of the new GFC method has been successfully tested on face recognition using 600 FERET frontal face images corresponding to 200 subjects, which were acquired under variable illumination and facial expressions. The novel GFC method achieves 100% accuracy on face recognition using only 62 features.

No abstract

This paper presents a basic color image discriminant (CID) model and its general version for color image recognition. The CID models seek to unify the color image representation and recognition tasks into one framework. The proposed models, therefore, involve two sets of variables: a set of color component combination coefficients for color image representation and one or multiple projection basis vectors for color image discrimination. An iterative basic CID algorithm and its general version are designed to find the optimal solution of the proposed models. The general CID (GCID) algorithm is further extended to generate three color components (such as the three color components of the RGB color images) for further improvement of the recognition performance. Experiments using the face recognition grand challenge (FRGC) database and the biometric experimentation environment (BEE) system show the effectiveness of the proposed models and algorithms. In particular, for the most challenging FRGC version 2 Experiment 4, which contains 12 776 training images, 16 028 controlled target images, and 8014 uncontrolled query images, the proposed method achieves the face verification rate (ROC III) of 78.26% at the false accept rate (FAR) of 0.1%.

No abstract

This paper describes an enhanced independent component analysis (EICA) method and its application to content based face image retrieval. EICA, whose enhanced retrieval performance is achieved by means of generalization analysis, operates in a reduced principal component analysis (PCA) space. The dimensionality of the PCA space is determined by balancing two competing criteria: the representation criterion for adequate data representation and the magnitude criterion for enhanced retrieval performance. The feasibility of the new EICA method has been successfully tested for content-based face image retrieval using 1,107 frontal face images from the FERET database. The images are acquired from 369 subjects under variable illumination, facial expression, and time (duplicated images). Experimental results show that the independent component analysis (ICA) method has poor generalization performance while the EICA method has enhanced generalization performance; the EICA method has better performance than the popular face recognition methods, such as the Eigenfaces method and the Fisherfaces method.