Face Recognition Based on Human Visual Perception Theories and Unsupervised ANN

Abstract

The face recognition problem has been faced for more than 30 years. Although a lot of research has been done, much more research is and will be required in order to end up with a robust face recognition system with a potential close to human performance. Currently face recognition systems, FRS, report high performance levels, however achievement of 100% of correct recognition is still a challenge. Even more, if the FRS must work on noncooperative environment its performance may decrease dramatically. Non-cooperative environments are characterized by changes on; pose, illumination, facial expression. Therefore FRS for non-cooperative environment represents an attractive challenge to researchers working on the face recognition area. Most of the work presented in the literature dealing with the face recognition problem follows an engineering approach that in some cases do not incorporate information from a psychological or neuroscience perspective. It is our interest in this material, to show how information from the psychological and neuroscience areas may contribute in the solution of the face recognition problem. The material covered in this chapter is aimed to show how joint knowledge from human face recognition and unsupervised systems may provide a robust alternative compared with other approaches. The psychological and neuroscience perspectives shows evidence that humans are deeply sensible to the face characteristic configuration, but the processing of this configuration is restricted to faces in a face-up position (Thompson, 1980), (Gauthier, 2002). This phenomenon suggests that the face perception process is a holistic configurable system. Although some work has been done in these areas, it is still uncertain, how the face feature extraction processes is achieved by a human being. An interesting case is about newborn face feature extraction. Studies on newborns demonstrate that babies perceive a completely diffuse world, and their face perception and recognition is based on curves and lines from the face (Bower, 2001), (Johnson, 2001), (Nelson, 2001), (Quinn et al., 2001) and (Slater A. & Quinn, 2001). Nowadays, there exists some research work on face recognition that has intended to incorporate psychological and neuroscience perspectives (Blanz & Vetter, 2003), (Burton et O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg