Identifying human faces in general appearances

Abstract

Identifying people in general appearances is a very practical, widely applicable, but extremely difficult problem, because it requires solutions to both automatic detection and recognition of human faces in arbitrary appearances and complex backgrounds. General appearances are referred to arbitrary variations in terms of face pose, orientation, expression, scale, background, as well as image contrast. A streamlined solution to face detection and face recognition in general appearances is proposed, which has the advantage of no requirement on normalizing image scales either in the stage of building up the face image library for recognition or in the stage of recognition per se. This is valuable in practice for it allows the application of this technique in many general scenarios in which general face appearances are expected under complex backgrounds. Experimental evaluations show that this method is a vital approach to many real applications.