Xiaoyang Tan

Enhanced Local Texture Feature Sets for Face Recognition Under Difficult Lighting Conditions

Making recognition more reliable under uncontrolled lighting conditions is one of the most important challenges for practical face recognition systems. We tackle this by combining the strengths of robust illumination normalization, local texture-based face representations, distance transform based matching, kernel-based feature extraction and multiple feature fusion. Specifically, we make three main contributions: 1) we present a simple and efficient preprocessing chain that eliminates most of the effects of changing illumination while still preserving the essential appearance details that are needed for recognition; 2) we introduce local ternary patterns (LTP), a generalization of the local binary pattern (LBP) local texture descriptor that is more discriminant and less sensitive to noise in uniform regions, and we show that replacing comparisons based on local spatial histograms with a distance transform based similarity metric further improves the performance of LBP/LTP based face recognition; and 3) we further improve robustness by adding Kernel principal component analysis (PCA) feature extraction and incorporating rich local appearance cues from two complementary sources-Gabor wavelets and LBP-showing that the combination is considerably more accurate than either feature set alone. The resulting method provides state-of-the-art performance on three data sets that are widely used for testing recognition under difficult illumination conditions: Extended Yale-B, CAS-PEAL-R1, and Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 2 experiment 4 (FRGC-204). For example, on the challenging FRGC-204 data set it halves the error rate relative to previously published methods, achieving a face verification rate of 88.1% at 0.1% false accept rate. Further experiments show that our preprocessing method outperforms several existing preprocessors for a range of feature sets, data sets and lighting conditions.

Sparsity preserving projections with applications to face recognition

Dimensionality reduction methods (DRs) have commonly been used as a principled way to understand the high-dimensional data such as face images. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised DR method called sparsity preserving projections (SPP). Unlike many existing techniques such as local preserving projection (LPP) and neighborhood preserving embedding (NPE), where local neighborhood information is preserved during the DR procedure, SPP aims to preserve the sparse reconstructive relationship of the data, which is achieved by minimizing a L1 regularization-related objective function. The obtained projections are invariant to rotations, rescalings and translations of the data, and more importantly, they contain natural discriminating information even if no class labels are provided. Moreover, SPP chooses its neighborhood automatically and hence can be more conveniently used in practice compared to LPP and NPE. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on three popular face databases (Yale, AR and Extended Yale B) with promising results.

Enhanced local texture feature sets for face recognition under difficult lighting conditions

Recognition in uncontrolled situations is one of the most important bottlenecks for practical face recognition systems. We address this by combining the strengths of robust illumination normalization, local texture based face representations and distance transform based matching metrics. Specifically, we make three main contributions: (i) we present a simple and efficient preprocessing chain that eliminates most of the effects of changing illumination while still preserving the essential appearance details that are needed for recognition; (ii) we introduce Local Ternary Patterns (LTP), a generalization of the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) local texture descriptor that is more discriminant and less sensitive to noise in uniform regions; and (iii) we show that replacing local histogramming with a local distance transform based similarity metric further improves the performance of LBP/LTP based face recognition. The resulting method gives state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets chosen to test recognition under difficult illumination conditions: Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 1 experiment 4, Extended Yale-B, and CMU PIE.

Recognizing partially occluded, expression variant faces from single training image per person with SOM and soft k-NN ensemble

Most classical template-based frontal face recognition techniques assume that multiple images per person are available for training, while in many real-world applications only one training image per person is available and the test images may be partially occluded or may vary in expressions. This paper addresses those problems by extending a previous local probabilistic approach presented by Martinez, using the self-organizing map (SOM) instead of a mixture of Gaussians to learn the subspace that represented each individual. Based on the localization of the training images, two strategies of learning the SOM topological space are proposed, namely to train a single SOM map for all the samples and to train a separate SOM map for each class, respectively. A soft k nearest neighbor (soft k-NN) ensemble method, which can effectively exploit the outputs of the SOM topological space, is also proposed to identify the unlabeled subjects. Experiments show that the proposed method exhibits high robust performance against the partial occlusions and variant expressions.

Fusing Gabor and LBP feature sets for kernel-based face recognition

Extending recognition to uncontrolled situations is a key challenge for practical face recognition systems. Finding efficient and discriminative facial appearance descriptors is crucial for this. Most existing approaches use features of just one type. Here we argue that robust recognition requires several different kinds of appearance information to be taken into account, suggesting the use of heterogeneous feature sets. We show that combining two of the most successful local face representations, Gabor wavelets and Local Binary Patterns (LBP), gives considerably better performance than either alone: they are complimentary in the sense that LBP captures small appearance details while Gabor features encode facial shape over a broader range of scales. Both feature sets are high dimensional so it is beneficial to use PCA to reduce the dimensionality prior to normalization and integration. The Kernel Discriminative Common Vector method is then applied to the combined feature vector to extract discriminant nonlinear features for recognition. The method is evaluated on several challenging face datasets including FRGC 1.0.4, FRGC 2.0.4 and FERET, with promising results.

Face liveness detection from a single image with sparse low rank bilinear discriminative model

Spoofing with photograph or video is one of the most common manner to circumvent a face recognition system. In this paper, we present a real-time and non-intrusive method to address this based on individual images from a generic webcamera. The task is formulated as a binary classification problem, in which, however, the distribution of positive and negative are largely overlapping in the input space, and a suitable representation space is hence of importance. Using the Lambertian model, we propose two strategies to extract the essential information about different surface properties of a live human face or a photograph, in terms of latent samples. Based on these, we develop two new extensions to the sparse logistic regression model which allow quick and accurate spoof detection. Primary experiments on a large photo imposter database show that the proposed method gives preferable detection performance compared to others.

Face Recognition Under Occlusions and Variant Expressions With Partial Similarity

Recognition in uncontrolled situations is one of the most important bottlenecks for practical face recognition systems. In particular, few researchers have addressed the challenge to recognize noncooperative or even uncooperative subjects who try to cheat the recognition system by deliberately changing their facial appearance through such tricks as variant expressions or disguise (e.g., by partial occlusions). This paper addresses these problems within the framework of similarity matching. A novel perception-inspired nonmetric partial similarity measure is introduced, which is potentially useful in dealing with the concerned problems because it can help capture the prominent partial similarities that are dominant in human perception. Two methods, based on the general golden section rule and the maximum margin criterion, respectively, are proposed to automatically set the similarity threshold. The effectiveness of the proposed method in handling large expressions, partial occlusions, and other distortions is demonstrated on several well-known face databases.

Sparsity preserving discriminant analysis for single training image face recognition

Single training image face recognition is one of the main challenges to appearance-based pattern recognition techniques. Many classical dimensionality reduction methods such as LDA have achieved success in face recognition field, but cannot be directly used to the single training image scenario. Recent graph-based semi-supervised dimensionality reduction (SSDR) provides a feasible strategy to deal with such problem. However, most of the existing SSDR algorithms such as semi-supervised discriminant analysis (SDA) are locality-oriented and generally suffer from the following issues: (1) they need a large number of unlabeled training samples to estimate the manifold structure in data, but such extra samples may not be easily obtained in a given face recognition task; (2) they model the local geometry of data by the nearest neighbor criterion which generally fails to obtain sufficient discriminative information due to the high-dimensionality of face image space; (3) they construct the underlying adjacency graph (or data-dependent regularizer) using a fixed neighborhood size for all the sample points without considering the actual data distribution. In this paper, we develop a new graph-based SSDR algorithm called sparsity preserving discriminant analysis (SPDA) to address these problems. More specifically, (1) the graph in SPDA is constructed by sparse representation, and thus the local structure in data is automatically modeled instead of being manually predefined. (2) With the natural discriminative power of sparse representation, SPDA can remarkably improve recognition performance only resorting to very few extra unlabeled samples. (3) A simple ensemble strategy is developed to accelerate graph construction, which results in an efficient ensemble SPDA algorithm. Extensive experiments on both toy and real face data sets are provided to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

A study on three linear discriminant analysis based methods in small sample size problem

In this paper, we make a study on three linear discriminant analysis (LDA) based methods: regularized discriminant analysis (RDA), discriminant common vectors (DCV) and maximal margin criterion (MMC) in the small sample size (SSS) problem. Our contributions are that: (1) we reveal that DCV obtains the same projection subspace as both RDA and wMMC (weighted MMC, a general form of MMC) when RDAs regularization parameter tends to zero and wMMCs weight parameter approaches to +∞, which builds on close relationships among these three LDA based methods; (2) we offer efficient algorithms to perform RDA and wMMC in the principal component analysis transformed space, which makes them feasible and efficient to applications such as face recognition; (3) we formulate the eigenvalue distribution of wMMC. On one hand, the formulated eigenvalue distribution can guide practitioners in choosing wMMCs projection vectors, and on the other hand, the underlying methodology can be employed in analyzing the eigenvalue distribution of matrices such as AAT-BBT, where the rows of A and B are far larger than their columns; and (4) we compare their classification performance on several benchmarks to get that, when the mean standard variance (MSV) criterion is small, DCV can obtain competitive classification performance to both RDA and wMMC under optimal parameters, but when MSV is large, DCV generally yields lower classification accuracy than RDA and wMMC under optimal parameters.

Comments on "Efficient and Robust Feature Extraction by Maximum Margin Criterion

In pattern recognition, feature extraction techniques are widely employed to reduce the dimensionality of data and to enhance the discriminatory information. Principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are the two most popular linear dimensionality reduction methods. However, PCA is not very effective for the extraction of the most discriminant features, and LDA is not stable due to the small sample size problem . In this paper, we propose some new (linear and nonlinear) feature extractors based on maximum margin criterion (MMC). Geometrically, feature extractors based on MMC maximize the (average) margin between classes after dimensionality reduction. It is shown that MMC can represent class separability better than PCA. As a connection to LDA, we may also derive LDA from MMC by incorporating some constraints. By using some other constraints, we establish a new linear feature extractor that does not suffer from the small sample size problem, which is known to cause serious stability problems for LDA. The kernelized (nonlinear) counterpart of this linear feature extractor is also established in the paper. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the new feature extractors are effective, stable, and efficient.