An integrated face detection and recognition system

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated approach to unconstrained face recognition in arbitrary scenes. The front end of the system comprises of a scale- and pose-tolerant face detector. Scale normalization is achieved through a novel combination of a skin color segmentation and log-polar mapping procedure. Principal component analysis is used with the multi-view approach proposed in [10] to handle the pose variations. For a given color input image, the detector encloses a face in a complex scene within a circular boundary and indicates the position of the nose. Next, for recognition, a radial grid mapping centered on the nose yields a feature vector within the circular boundary. As the width of the color segmented region provides an estimated size for the face, the extracted feature vector is scale-normalized by the estimated size. The feature vector is input to a trained neural network classifier for face identification. The system was evaluated using a database of 20 person's faces with varying scale and pose obtained on different complex backgrounds. The face detector was quite robust to all these variations. The performance of the face recognizer was also quite good except for sensitivity to small-scale face images. The integrated system achieved average recognition rates of 87% to 92%. © 1999 IEEE.