A Statistical Discriminant Model for Face Interpretation and Reconstruction

Abstract

Multivariate statistical approaches have played an important role of recognising face images and characterizing their differences. In this paper, we introduce the idea of using a two-stage separating hyper-plane, here called Statistical Discriminant Model (SDM), to interpret and reconstruct face images. Analogously to the well-known Active Appearance Model proposed by Cootes et. al, SDM requires a previous alignment of all the images to a common template to minimise variations that are not necessarily related to differences between the faces. However, instead of using landmarks or annotations on the images, SDM is based on the idea of using PCA to reduce the dimensionality of the original images and a maximum uncertainty linear classifier (MLDA) to characterise the most discriminant changes between the groups of images. The experimental results based on frontal face images indicate that the SDM approach provides an intuitive interpretation of the differences between groups, reconstructing characteristics that are very subjective in human beings, such as beauty and happiness.