Performance Evaluation of Block-Sized Algorithms for Majority Vote in Facial Recognition

Abstract

Facial recognition (FR) is a pattern recognition problem, in which images can be considered as a matrix of pixels.There are manychallenges that affect the performance of face recognitionincluding illumination variation, occlusion, and blurring. In this paper,a few preprocessing techniques are suggested to handle the illumination variationsproblem. Also, other phases of face recognition problems like feature extraction and classification are discussed. Preprocessing techniques like Histogram Equalization (HE), Gamma Intensity Correction (GIC), and Regional Histogram Equalization (RHE) are tested inthe AT&T database. For feature extraction, methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) are applied. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as the classifier. Both holistic and block-based methods are tested using the AT&T database. For twelve different combinations of preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification methods, experiments involving various block sizes are conducted to assess the computation performance and recognition accuracy for the AT&T dataset.Using the block-based method, 100% accuracy is achieved with the combination of GIC preprocessing, LDA feature extraction,and SVM classification using 2x2 block-sizingwhile the holistic method yields the maximum accuracy of 93.5%. The block-sized algorithm performs better than the holistic approach under poor lighting conditions.SVM Radial Basis Function performs extremely well on theAT&Tdataset for both holistic and block-based approaches.