Integrating Global Zernike and Local Discriminative HOG Features for Face Recognition

Abstract

Extraction of global face appearance and local interior differences is essential for any face recognition application. This paper presents a novel framework for face recognition by combining two effective descriptors namely, Zernike moments (ZM) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG). ZMs are global descriptors that are invariant to image rotation, noise and scale. HOGs capture local details and are robust to illumination changes. Fusion of these two descriptors combines the merits of both local and global approaches and is effective against diverse variations present in face images. Further, as the processing time of HOG features is high owing to its large dimensionality, so, the study proposes to improve its performance by selecting only most discriminative HOG features (named discriminative HOG (DHOG)) for performing recognition. Efficacy of the proposed methods (DHOG, [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]) is tested on ORL, Yale and FERET databases. DHOG provides an improvement of 3% to 5% over the existing HOG approach. Recognition results achieved by [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are up to 15% and 18% higher respectively than those obtained with these descriptors individually. Performance is also analyzed on LFW face database and compared with recent and state-of-the-art methods.