ICTACT Journal on Image and Video Processing

R. Reena Rose ¹, A. Suruliandi ², K. Meena ³

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Applications, St. Xavier’s Catholic College of Engineering, IN
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, IN
3 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, J. P. College of Engineering, IN

Abstract

Texture descriptors have an important role in recognizing face images. However, almost all the existing local texture descriptors use nearest neighbors to encode a texture pattern around a pixel. But in face images, most of the pixels have similar characteristics with that of its nearest neighbors because the skin covers large area in a face and the skin tone at neighboring regions are same. Therefore this paper presents a general framework called Local Texture Description Framework that uses only eight pixels which are at certain distance apart either circular or elliptical from the referenced pixel. Local texture description can be done using the foundation of any existing local texture descriptors. In this paper, the performance of the proposed framework is verified with three existing local texture descriptors Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Texture Pattern (LTP) and Local Tetra Patterns (LTrPs) for the five issues viz. facial expression, partial occlusion, illumination variation, pose variation and general recognition. Five benchmark databases JAFFE, Essex, Indian faces, AT & T and Georgia Tech are used for the experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that even with less number of patterns, the proposed framework could achieve higher recognition accuracy than that of their base models.

Keywords

Face Recognition, Local Texture Description Framework, Nearest Neighborhood Classification, Chi-Square Distance Metric.

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A. Suruliandi ¹, R. Reena Rose ², K. Meena ³

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, IN
2 Department of Computer Applications, St. Xavier’s Catholic College of Engineering, IN
3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sardar Raja College of Engineering, IN

Abstract

Texture feature plays a predominant role in recognizing face images. However different persons can have similar texture features that may degrade the system performance. Hence in this paper, the problem of face similarity is addressed by proposing a solution which combines textural and geometrical features. An algorithm is proposed to combine these two features. Five texture descriptors and few geometrical features are considered to validate the proposed system. Performance evaluations of these features are carried out independently and jointly for three different issues such as expression variation, illumination variation and partial occlusion with objects. It is observed that the combination of textural and geometrical features enhance the accuracy of face recognition. Experimental results on Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) and ESSEX databases indicate that the texture descriptor Local Binary Pattern achieves better recognition accuracy for all the issues considered.

Keywords

Face Recognition, Texture Features, Geometric Features, Nearest Neighborhood Classification, Chi-Square Distance Metric.

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K. Meena ¹, A. Suruliandi ², R. Reena Rose ³

Affiliations
1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, J. P. College of Engineering, IN
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, IN
3 Department of Computer Applications, St. Xavier’s Catholic College of Engineering, IN

Abstract

Automatic face recognition remains an interesting but challenging computer vision open problem. Poor illumination is considered as one of the major issue, since illumination changes cause large variation in the facial features. To resolve this, illumination normalization preprocessing techniques are employed in this paper to enhance the face recognition rate. The methods such as Histogram Equalization (HE), Gamma Intensity Correction (GIC), Normalization chain and Modified Homomorphic Filtering (MHF) are used for preprocessing. Owing to great success, the texture features are commonly used for face recognition. But these features are severely affected by lighting changes. Hence texture based models Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Derivative Pattern (LDP), Local Texture Pattern (LTP) and Local Tetra Patterns (LTrPs) are experimented under different lighting conditions. In this paper, illumination invariant face recognition technique is developed based on the fusion of illumination preprocessing with local texture descriptors. The performance has been evaluated using YALE B and CMU-PIE databases containing more than 1500 images. The results demonstrate that MHF based normalization gives significant improvement in recognition rate for the face images with large illumination conditions.

Keywords

Face Recognition, Texture Analysis, Texture Features.

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