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.

/pdf/labeled-faces-in-the-wild-a-database-forstudying-face-2prti1m53k.pdf

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

A large family of algorithms - supervised or unsupervised; stemming from statistics or geometry theory - has been designed to provide different solutions to the problem of dimensionality reduction. Despite the different motivations of these algorithms, we present in this paper a general formulation known as graph embedding to unify them within a common framework. In graph embedding, each algorithm can be considered as the direct graph embedding or its linear/kernel/tensor extension of a specific intrinsic graph that describes certain desired statistical or geometric properties of a data set, with constraints from scale normalization or a penalty graph that characterizes a statistical or geometric property that should be avoided. Furthermore, the graph embedding framework can be used as a general platform for developing new dimensionality reduction algorithms. By utilizing this framework as a tool, we propose a new supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm called marginal Fisher analysis in which the intrinsic graph characterizes the intraclass compactness and connects each data point with its neighboring points of the same class, while the penalty graph connects the marginal points and characterizes the interclass separability. We show that MFA effectively overcomes the limitations of the traditional linear discriminant analysis algorithm due to data distribution assumptions and available projection directions. Real face recognition experiments show the superiority of our proposed MFA in comparison to LDA, also for corresponding kernel and tensor extensions

/pdf/graph-embedding-and-extensions-a-general-framework-for-4kcvd1spfx.pdf

Graph Embedding and Extensions: A General Framework for Dimensionality Reduction

A large family of algorithms - supervised or unsupervised; stemming from statistics or geometry theory - has been designed to provide different solutions to the problem of dimensionality reduction Despite the different motivations of these algorithms, we present in this paper a general formulation known as graph embedding to unify them within a common framework In graph embedding, each algorithm can be considered as the direct graph embedding or its linear/kernel/tensor extension of a specific intrinsic graph that describes certain desired statistical or geometric properties of a data set, with constraints from scale normalization or a penalty graph that characterizes a statistical or geometric property that should be avoided Furthermore, the graph embedding framework can be used as a general platform for developing new dimensionality reduction algorithms By utilizing this framework as a tool, we propose a new supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm called marginal Fisher analysis in which the intrinsic graph characterizes the intraclass compactness and connects each data point with its neighboring points of the same class, while the penalty graph connects the marginal points and characterizes the interclass separability We show that MFA effectively overcomes the limitations of the traditional linear discriminant analysis algorithm due to data distribution assumptions and available projection directions Real face recognition experiments show the superiority of our proposed MFA in comparison to LDA, also for corresponding kernel and tensor extensions

/pdf/graph-embedding-and-extensions-a-general-framework-for-4akbm18bso.pdf

Keywords: vision Reference EPFL-CONF-82502 URL: ftp://ftp.idiap.ch/pub/papers/vision/avbpa99.pdf Record created on 2006-03-10, modified on 2017-05-10

XM2VTSDB: The Extended M2VTS Database

This document describes a proposal for an evaluation protocol for the extended {M2VTS} database ({XM2VTSDB}) including the training of experts and supervisor.

Evaluation Protocol for the extended M2VTS Database (XM2VTSDB)

This paper describes experiments of a text-independent speaker verification method that has been evaluated on two laboratory databases (M2VTS and XM2VTS) and on one field test database (LoCoMic). This work has been performed within the European ACTS-M2VTS project (Multi-Modal Verification for Teleservices and Security Applications) which is concerned with person authentication using multiple modalities. The system achieved good performance on M2VTS and XM2VTS databases whereas the performance decreased on the LoCoMic database which is more representative of real conditions. In fact, we have shown that in text independent mode, the performance differs significantly according to the test item considered (digits, name, and sentence). This shows that, even in text in dependent mode, the access control system should propose a structure for the uttered sentence.

Gilbert Maître

Papers

XM2VTSDB: The Extended M2VTS Database

Evaluation Protocol for the extended M2VTS Database (XM2VTSDB)

Experimental evaluation of text-dependent speaker verification on laboratory and field test databases in the M2VTS project