Dynamic Local Feature Analysis for Face Recognition

Johnny NG and Humphrey CHEUNG

Titanium Technology Research Centre 10/F, Tianjin Building, 167 Connaught Road West, Hong Kong, PR China {Johnny.ng, Humphrey.cheung}@titanium-tech.com

Abstract. This paper introduces an innovative method, Dynamic Local Feature Analysis (DLFA), for human face recognition. In our proposed method, the face shape and the facial texture information are combined together by using the Local Feature Analysis (LFA) technique. The shape information is obtained by using our proposed adaptive edge detecting method that can reduce the effect on different lighting conditions, while the texture information provides the details of the normalized facial feature on the image. Finally, both the shape and texture information is combined together by means of LFA for dimension reduction. As a result, a high recognition rate is achieved no matter the face is enrolled under different or bad lighting conditions.

1 Introduction
Face recognition has become one of most important biometrics authentication technologies during the past few years. There are at least two reasons that can explain why face recognition has received extensive attention: 1) Face recognition has many applications, such as the biometrics system, the content-based video processing system, and law enforcement system. A strong need for a robust automatic face recognition system is obvious due to the widespread use of photo-ID for personal identification and security. 2) Although there are some extremely reliable methods of biometric personal identification existed such as fingerprint scans and iris scans, face recognition can still be effective because it does not require the cooperation or any other special knowledge of the participant. Besides that, building an automatic face recognition system normally is cheaper than building a personal identification system based on fingerprint scans or iris scans. The human face is a highly variable objects, it is very difficult to develop a fast and robust face recognition system. Since the recognition rate may be affected by the presence of glasses, facial hairs, facial expression, lighting conditions, etc. In order to reduce the above problems, we combined the texture and the shape information by using the Local Feature Analysis (LFA) technique to develop a robust face recognition algorithm. The shape information is obtained by using our proposed adaptive edge detecting method that can reduce the effect on different lighting conditions, while the texture information provides the details of the normalized facial feature on the image. The organization of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, a

literature review is presented to summaries the recent works by other researchers. In Section 3, we present our proposed Dynamic Local Feature Analysis method, which is based on the LFA formalism combined with the texture space and the edge information. In Section 4, the experimental result of our proposed method will be presented to support the significance of this research. Finally, a conclusion is given in Section 5.

Literature Review

In 1995, Chellappa [1] summarized the existing techniques for human face recognition. Later, Zhao, Chellappa and Rosenfeld provide a more details information about human face recognition in a technical report [2]. From both reports, we can find that most of the current face recognition algorithms can be categorized into two classes, image template based or geometry feature-based. The template-based methods [3] compute the correlation between a face and one or more model templates to estimate the face identity. Statistical tools such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) [5], Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) [4], Principal Component Analysis (PCA) [6], Kernel methods [7], and Neural Networks [10] have been used to construct a suitable set of face templates. Wiskott et al. developed an elastic Bunch graph matching algorithm for face recognition in [8]. However, it may not achieve a high recognition rate if the enrollment process and the verification process are not done in the same lighting conditions. Thus, Penev et. al [9] proposed the LFA by modifying the PCA in order to solve the above problems. Local Feature Analysis (LFA) is a derivative of the eigenface method. Local Feature Analysis utilizes specific features for identification instead of the entire representation of the face. The system selects specific areas of the face, such as the eyes or mouth, to use as the defining features for recognition.

Dynamic Local Feature Analysis

In this section, a novel face recognition technique Dynamic Local Feature Analysis (DLFA) is illustrated. Our approach can be divided into two main steps. The first step is preprocessing. The goal of this step is to get rid of high intensity noise, transform the input face image into a binary one by adaptive edge detection and then extract the texture of the face. The second step employs the local feature analysis to combine both edge of face shape and the texture. 3.1 Preprocessing

In general, a face contains four main organs, i.e. eyebrows, eye, nose, and mouth; it is very important in the face recognition system. In order to reduce the noise and some dark features around these four organs, an opening operation is employed on the input

face image to achieve this propose. This operation can prevent the facial features from breaking into pieces, sharps and bright noises such as reflections on eyes. In order to properly generate a binary edge image from an input face image, a adaptive edge analysis is proposed in our approach. The advantage of using edge as one of the image feature is that they can provide robustness to illumination change and simplicity of presentation. The input face image is firstly processed with morphological edge detection and then converts the resulted gray scale edge image into binary format. A fixed threshold does not work well for converting a gray scale edge image to a binary edge image. This is due to the fact that the contrast in edge image may vary significantly. In our approach, we use a dynamic threshold in each sub-block of edge image to obtain the corresponding threshold binary image. The threshold T is calculated dynamically in each sub-block of face image by considering the gray-level intensities of the 15% highest pixel intensities. Assume that the histogram of each sub-block of the edge image of size his(i), where i = 0,1,,255. Then T is determined as the largest value such that the following equation is satisfied:

his(i) 0.15h w
i =T

255

(1)

where h and w is the high and the width of each sub-block of an edge image respectively. Fig. 2 shows some of adaptive edge analysis result.

(a) (b) (c) (d) Fig. 1. Some of adaptive edge analysis result. (a) and (c): original facial images; (b) and (d): binary edge. 3.2 Local Feature Analysis

Local Feature Analysis (LFA) defines a set of topographic, local kernels that are optimally matched to the second-order statistics of the input ensemble [15]. The kernels are derived from the principal component axes, and consist of sphering the PCA coefficients to equalize their variance, followed by a rotation to pixel space. We begin with the zero-mean matrix of original images, X. The X is the texture information of the training image and then follow is the edge information. Then, calculate the principal component eigenvectors P according to S = PDPT . Penev and Atick [15] defined a set of kernels, K as

K = PVPT

(2)

where

V =D

1 2

1 i = 1, ,p = diag i

where i are the eigenvalues of S. The rows of K contain the kernels. The kernels were found to have spatially local properties and are topographic in the sense that they are indexed by spatial location. The kernel matrix K transforms X to the LFA output O = KXT. Note that the matrix V is the inverse square root of the covariance matrix of the principal component coefficients. This transform spheres the principal component coefficients (normalizes their output variance to unity) and minimizes correlations in the LFA output. Another way to interpret the LFA output O is that it is the image reconstruction using sphered PCA coefficients, O = P(VPTXT).

3.3

Sparsification of LFA

LFA produces an n-dimensional representation, where n is the number of pixels in the images. Since we have n outputs described by p << n linearly independent variables, there are residual correlations in the output. Penev and Atick presented an algorithm for reducing the dimensionality of the representation by choosing a subset M of outputs that were as decorrelated as possible. The sparsification algorithm was an iterative algorithm based on multiple linear regression. At each time step, the output point that was predicted most poorly by multiple linear regression on the points in M was added to M. Due to the topographic property of the kernels, selection of output points was equivalent to selection of kernels for the representation. The methods addressed image representation but did not address recognition. The sparsification algorithm in selected a different set of kernels, M, for each image, which is problematic for recognition. In order to make the representation amenable to recognition, we selected a single set M of kernels for all images. At each time step, the kernel corresponding to the pixel with the largest mean reconstruction error across all images was added to M. At each step, the kernel added to M is chosen as the kernel corresponding to location
arg max O O rec
2

(3)

where Orec is a reconstruction of the complete output, O, using a linear predictor on the subset of the outputs O generated from the kernels in M. The linear predictor is of the form:

Y = X

(4)

where Y = Orec, is the vector of the regression parameters, and X = O(M,N). Here, O(M,N) denotes the subset of O corresponding to the points in M for all N images. is calculated from:

YX (O rec ) T O( M , N ) = ( X T X ) O( M , N ) T O( M , N )

(5)

Equation (5) can also be expressed in terms of the correlation matrix of the outputs, C = OTO,

= C ( M , N )C (M , M ) 1
the termination condition was |M| = N.

(6)

Experimental Results

In order to prove the efficiency and accuracy of our face recognition method, we used a number of face databases, which included face images taken under roughly controlled imaging conditions as test images. The ORL face database (from the Oliver Research Laboratory in Cambridge, UK), Yale face database (from the Yale University), MIT face database, and Ti-Lab database were used in the experiments. The MIT database has 144 face images with 16 distinct subjects, while the Yale database has 150 face images with 15 distinct subjects. The Ti-Lab database has 58,960 face images with 5,896 subjects. For the ORL database, there are 400 different face images corresponding to 40 distinct persons, but only six images for each of the 40 subjects were included in the testing set. For the FERET database, there are over 6,000 different face images corresponding to 699 distinct persons, but only 289 subjects were included in the testing set. The experimental setup consisted of an upright frontal view of each of the subjects with a suitable scale and a normal facial expression was chosen to form a database. In our system, the position of the two eyes in a face image is manually located firstly. Then based on the eye positions, all the facial images in the database and the query input are normalized to a size of 80 80 with 256 gray scale levels. Since the images are acquired from different face databases, the pose variations, the lighting conditions and the facial expressions may vary (see Fig. 3). The number of subjects and number of testing images for the respective databases are tabulated in Table 1. The performances of the Dynamic Local Feature Analysis technique was evaluated based on the respective database.
Table 1. The number of faces in the ORL, Yale, MIT, FERET, Ti-Lab database. Subject Testing set ORL 40 240 Yale 15 150 MIT 16 144 FERET 289 1,445 Ti-Lab 5,896 58,960 Total 6,256 60,939

Fig. 2. Sample face images of Ti-Lab face database used in our experiments.

In the experiment, we implemented and evaluated the relative performances of the Dynamic Local Feature Analysis (DLFA) and Local Feature Analysis (LFA) technique. A query image is compared to all of the face images in the database and the face images are then ranked and arranged in ascending order according to their corresponding measured euclidean distances. Table 2 tabulates the recognition rates of DLFA and LFA for each of the five individual databases. Experimental results show that the DLFA outperforms LFA method. The recognition rates of DLFA based on the ORL, Yale, MIT, FERET, Ti-Lab are 91%, 89%, 92%, 90%, and 87%, respectively. Fig. 4 illustrates the cumulative recognition rates of the both techniques based on the five face databases. The experiments were conducted on a Pentium IV 2.4 GHz computer system. The average runtimes for the DLFA are about 345ms.
Table 2. Recognition rates of the LFA and DLFA face recognition techniques with different database Method ORL database Yale database MIT database FERET database Ti-Lab database Average Recognition Rate
1 0.95 0.9 0.85 0.8 0.75 0.7 0.65 0.6 0.55 0.5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Number of best matches (Rank)

LFA (%) 63 62 58 61 62 61.2

DLFA (%) 91 89 92 90 87 89.8

Recognition Rate

LFA DLFA 9 10

Fig. 3. Comparison of the overall recognition rates.

Conclusions

In this paper, a robust face recognition method, Dynamic Local Feature Analysis (DLFA), which employs the LFA on integrated with the face shape, is proposed. The main idea of DLFA focuses on the individual features such as the eyes, the nose, the mouth and areas of definite bone curvature differences, such as the cheeks. The DLFA approach offers several advantages over similar facial recognition technologies. DLFA systems are not as sensitive to face deformities and lighting variations as the eigenface method. Also, DLFA systems can recognize faces that are not presented to the camera as a complete frontal view. The system can recognize an individual facing up to 25 degrees away from the camera. Experimental results based on a combination of the MIT, Yale, FERET, Ti-Lab, and ORL databases show that DLFA can achieve recognition rates of 89.8%, 94.7% and 96.6% for the first one, the first three and the first five likely matched faces, respectively. The technique in this paper is computationally simple and can provide a reasonable performance level. In practice, our approach can be used as a robust human face recognition system, which selects those similar faces to an input face from a large face database.

References
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