As one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding, face recognition has recently received significant attention, especially during the past several years. At least two reasons account for this trend: the first is the wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and the second is the availability of feasible technologies after 30 years of research. Even though current machine recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited by the conditions imposed by many real applications. For example, recognition of face images acquired in an outdoor environment with changes in illumination and/or pose remains a largely unsolved problem. In other words, current systems are still far away from the capability of the human perception system.This paper provides an up-to-date critical survey of still- and video-based face recognition research. There are two underlying motivations for us to write this survey paper: the first is to provide an up-to-date review of the existing literature, and the second is to offer some insights into the studies of machine recognition of faces. To provide a comprehensive survey, we not only categorize existing recognition techniques but also present detailed descriptions of representative methods within each category. In addition, relevant topics such as psychophysical studies, system evaluation, and issues of illumination and pose variation are covered.

Face recognition: A literature survey

Most face databases have been created under controlled conditions to facilitate the study of specific parameters on the face recognition problem. These parameters include such variables as position, pose, lighting, background, camera quality, and gender. While there are many applications for face recognition technology in which one can control the parameters of image acquisition, there are also many applications in which the practitioner has little or no control over such parameters. This database, Labeled Faces in the Wild, is provided as an aid in studying the latter, unconstrained, recognition problem. The database contains labeled face photographs spanning the range of conditions typically encountered in everyday life. The database exhibits “natural” variability in factors such as pose, lighting, race, accessories, occlusions, and background. In addition to describing the details of the database, we provide specific experimental paradigms for which the database is suitable. This is done in an effort to make research performed with the database as consistent and comparable as possible. We provide baseline results, including results of a state of the art face recognition system combined with a face alignment system. To facilitate experimentation on the database, we provide several parallel databases, including an aligned version.

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Labeled Faces in the Wild: A Database forStudying Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environments

This paper presents a novel and efficient facial image representation based on local binary pattern (LBP) texture features. The face image is divided into several regions from which the LBP feature distributions are extracted and concatenated into an enhanced feature vector to be used as a face descriptor. The performance of the proposed method is assessed in the face recognition problem under different challenges. Other applications and several extensions are also discussed

Face Description with Local Binary Patterns: Application to Face Recognition

Humans perceive the three-dimensional structure of the world with apparent ease. However, despite all of the recent advances in computer vision research, the dream of having a computer interpret an image at the same level as a two-year old remains elusive. Why is computer vision such a challenging problem and what is the current state of the art? Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications explores the variety of techniques commonly used to analyze and interpret images. It also describes challenging real-world applications where vision is being successfully used, both for specialized applications such as medical imaging, and for fun, consumer-level tasks such as image editing and stitching, which students can apply to their own personal photos and videos. More than just a source of recipes, this exceptionally authoritative and comprehensive textbook/reference also takes a scientific approach to basic vision problems, formulating physical models of the imaging process before inverting them to produce descriptions of a scene. These problems are also analyzed using statistical models and solved using rigorous engineering techniques Topics and features: structured to support active curricula and project-oriented courses, with tips in the Introduction for using the book in a variety of customized courses; presents exercises at the end of each chapter with a heavy emphasis on testing algorithms and containing numerous suggestions for small mid-term projects; provides additional material and more detailed mathematical topics in the Appendices, which cover linear algebra, numerical techniques, and Bayesian estimation theory; suggests additional reading at the end of each chapter, including the latest research in each sub-field, in addition to a full Bibliography at the end of the book; supplies supplementary course material for students at the associated website, http://szeliski.org/Book/. Suitable for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in computer science or engineering, this textbook focuses on basic techniques that work under real-world conditions and encourages students to push their creative boundaries. Its design and exposition also make it eminently suitable as a unique reference to the fundamental techniques and current research literature in computer vision.

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Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications

We seek to build a large collection of images with ground truth labels to be used for object detection and recognition research. Such data is useful for supervised learning and quantitative evaluation. To achieve this, we developed a web-based tool that allows easy image annotation and instant sharing of such annotations. Using this annotation tool, we have collected a large dataset that spans many object categories, often containing multiple instances over a wide variety of images. We quantify the contents of the dataset and compare against existing state of the art datasets used for object recognition and detection. Also, we show how to extend the dataset to automatically enhance object labels with WordNet, discover object parts, recover a depth ordering of objects in a scene, and increase the number of labels using minimal user supervision and images from the web.

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LabelMe: A Database and Web-Based Tool for Image Annotation

We present a component-based method and two global methods for face recognition and evaluate them with respect to robustness against pose changes. In the component system we first locate facial components, extract them and combine them into a single feature vector which is classified by a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The two global systems recognize faces by classifying a single feature vector consisting of the gray values of the whole face image. In the first global system we trained a single SVM classifier for each person in the database. The second system consists of sets of viewpoint-specific SVM classifiers and involves clustering during training. We performed extensive tests on a database which included faces rotated up to about 40/spl deg/ in depth. The component system clearly outperformed both global systems on all tests.

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Face recognition with support vector machines: global versus component-based approach

http://cbcl.mit.edu/publications/ps/heisele-cviu-03.pdf

Face recognition: component-based versus global approaches

We present a novel approach to pose and illumination invariant face recognition that combines two recent advances in the computer vision field: component-based recognition and 3D morphable models. First, a 3D morphable model is used to generate 3D face models from three input images from each person in the training database. The 3D models are rendered under varying pose and illumination conditions to build a large set of synthetic images. These images are then used to train a component-based face recognition system. The resulting system achieved 90% accuracy on a database of 1200 real images of six people and significantly outperformed a comparable global face recognition system. The results show the potential of the combination of morphable models and component-based recognition towards pose and illumination invariant face recognition based on only three training images of each subject.

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Component-based face recognition with 3D morphable models

We present a system for pose and illumination invariant face recognition that combines two recent advances in the computer vision field: 3D morphable models and component-based recognition. A 3D morphable model is used to compute 3D face models from three input images of each subject in the training database. The 3D models are rendered under varying pose and illumination conditions to build a large set of synthetic images. These images are then used for training a component-based face recognition system. The face recognition module is preceded by a fast hierarchical face detector resulting in a system that can detect and identify faces in video images at about 4 Hz. The system achieved a recognition rate of 88% on a database of 2000 real images of ten people, which is significantly better than a comparable global face recognition system. The results clearly show the potential of the combination of morphable models and component-based recognition towards pose and illumination invariant face recognition.

Component-Based Face recognition with 3D Morphable Models

We present a component-based framework for face detection and identification. The face detection and identification modules share the same hierarchical architecture. They both consist of two layers of classifiers, a layer with a set of component classifiers and a layer with a single combination classifier. The component classifiers independently detect/identify facial parts in the image. Their outputs are passed the combination classifier which performs the final detection/identification of the face.

We describe an algorithm which automatically learns two separate sets of facial components for the detection and identification tasks. In experiments we compare the detection and identification systems to standard global approaches. The experimental results clearly show that our component-based approach is superior to global approaches.

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Bernd Heisele

Papers

Face recognition with support vector machines: global versus component-based approach

Face recognition: component-based versus global approaches

Component-based face recognition with 3D morphable models

Component-Based Face recognition with 3D Morphable Models

A Component-based Framework for Face Detection and Identification