<title>Effects of compression and individual variability on face recognition performance</title>

Abstract

The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 requires that the Visa Waiver Program be available only to countries that have a program to issue to their nationals machine-readable passports incorporating biometric identifiers complying with applicable standards established by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). In June 2002, the New Technologies Working Group of ICAO unanimously endorsed the use of face recognition (FR) as the globally interoperable biometric for machine-assisted identity confirmation with machine-readable travel documents (MRTDs), although Member States may elect to use fingerprint and/or iris recognition as additional biometric technologies. The means and formats are still being developed through which biometric information might be stored in the constrained space of integrated circuit chips embedded within travel documents. Such information will be stored in an open, yet unalterable and very compact format, probably as digitally signed and efficiently compressed images.The objective of this research is to characterize the many factors that affect FR system performance with respect to the legislated mandates concerning FR. A photograph acquisition environment and a commercial face recognition system have been installed at Mitretek, and over 1,400 images have been collected of volunteers.The image database and FR system are being used to analyze the effects of lossy image compression, individual differences, such as eyeglasses and facial hair, and the acquisition environment on FR system performance. Images are compressed by varying ratios using JPEG2000 to determine the trade-off points between recognition accuracy and compression ratio. The various acquisition factors that contribute to differences in FR system performance among individuals are also being measured. The results of this study will be used to refine and test efficient face image interchange standards that ensure highly accurate recognition, both for automated FR systems and human inspectors. Working within the M1-Biometrics Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) organization, a standard face image format will be tested and submitted to organizations such as ICAO.

Comparison of compression algorithms' impact on iris recognition accuracy II: revisiting JPEG

“…4 Compression effects with respect to face recognition accuracy have been studied in dedicated papers as well: the impact of JPEG und JPEG2000 on the recognition results of 12 different face recognition techniques is investigated, 5 and varying bitrates are employed using JPEG2000 to determine the trade-off points between recognition accuracy and compression rate. 6 ISO/IEC 19794-6 allows iris image data to be stored in lossy manner in the JPEG and JPEG2000 formats. Two types of iris image data are considered: rectilinear images (i.e.…”

Assessment of H.264 video compression on automated face recognition performance in surveillance and mobile video scenarios

“…The filtering step mitigates the jagged edges that result from image and video codecs (e.g., JPEG, MPEG) that independently transform and quantize 16x16 luminance and 8x8 chroma macroblocks. The impact these compression artifacts can have on on the match performance of various image-based biometrics 5,6 has been evaluated and attempts at mitigation ranging from simple post-processing blurring to customized codecs 12 have been developed. In the case of H.264, such mitigation is now provided automatically by the decode-time filtering stage of the codec.…”

“…The impact of image compression on template size is an important design factor, especially in respect to the management of large galleries 5 and the embedding of digital templates within travel documents 8 such as smartcards. A comprehensive evaluation of the impact of JPEG and JPEG2000 image compression 5,6 claims that facial images can be compressed by at least an order of magnitude without significant degradation in automated face recognition performance. In addition, research into facial recognition algorithms specifically designed for compressed images 7 has been conducted.…”

Evaluating the Effect of JPEG and JPEG2000 on Selected Face Recognition Algorithms

“…Their results showed no performance drop for JPEG compression and a slight increase for wavelet compression. A work on JPEG2000 was done in [20]. Compression was done at a ratio of 10:1.…”