Eigenface Method Research Articles

Face recognition using the embedded HMM with second-order block-specific observations

The paper is concerned with face recognition using the embedded hidden Markov model (EHMM) with second-order block-specific observations. The proposed method partitions a face image into a 2-D lattice type, composed of many blocks. Each block is represented by the second-order block-specific observation that consists of a combination of first- and second-order feature vectors. The first-order (or second-order) feature vector is obtained by projecting the original (or residual) block image onto the first (or second) basis vector that is obtained block-specifically by applying the PCA to a set of original (or residual) block images. A sequence of feature vectors obtained from the top-to-bottom and the left-to-right scanned blocks are used as an observation sequence to train EHMM. The EHMM models the face image in a hierarchical manner as follows. Several super states are used to model the vertical facial features such as the forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, and several states in the super state are used to model the localized features in a vertical face feature. Recognition is performed by identifying the person of the model that provides the highest value of observation probability. Experimental results show that the proposed recognition method outperforms many existing methods, such as the second-order eigenface method, the EHMM with DCT observations, and the second-order eigenface method using a confidence factor in terms of average of the normalized modified retrieval rank and false identification rate.

Automated lung outline reconstruction in ventilation–perfusion scans using principal component analysis techniques

The present work addresses the development of an automated software-based system utilized in order to create an outline reconstruction of lung images from ventilation–perfusion scans for the purpose of diagnosing pulmonary embolism. The proposed diagnostic software procedure would require a standard set of digitized ventilation–perfusion scans in addition to correlated chest X-rays as key components in the identification of an ideal template match used to approximate and reconstruct the outline of the lungs. These reconstructed lung images would then be used to extract the necessary PIOPED-compliant features which would warrant a pulmonary embolism diagnosis. In order to evaluate this issue, two separate principal component analysis (PCA) algorithms were employed independently, including Eigenlungs, which was adapted from the Eigenfaces method, and an artificial neural network. The results obtained through MATLAB TM simulation indicated that lung outline reconstruction through the PCA approach carries significant viability.

Face recognition using line edge map

The automatic recognition of human faces presents a significant challenge to the pattern recognition research community. Typically, human faces are very similar in structure with minor differences from person to person. They are actually within one class of "human face". Furthermore, lighting conditions change, while facial expressions and pose variations further complicate the face recognition task as one of the difficult problems in pattern analysis. This paper proposes a novel concept: namely, that faces can be recognized using a line edge map (LEM). The LEM, a compact face feature, is generated for face coding and recognition. A thorough investigation of the proposed concept is conducted which covers all aspects of human face recognition, i.e. face recognition under (1) controlled/ideal conditions and size variations, (2) varying lighting conditions, (3) varying facial expressions, and (4) varying pose. The system performance is also compared with the eigenface method, one of the best face recognition techniques, and with reported experimental results of other methods. A face pre-filtering technique is proposed to speed up the search process. It is a very encouraging to find that the proposed face recognition technique has performed better than the eigenface method in most of the comparison experiments. This research demonstrates that the LEM, together with the proposed generic line-segment Hausdorff distance measure, provides a new method for face coding and recognition.

Face recognition using the mixture-of-eigenfaces method

This paper deals with face recognition using the mixture-of-eigenfaces method. The well-known eigenface method uses one set of holistic facial features obtained by principal component analysis (PCA). However, a single set of eigenfaces is not enough to represent face images with large variations. To overcome this weakness, we propose the mixture-of-eigenfaces method, which uses more than one set of eigenfaces obtained from the expection maximization learning in the PCA mixture model. In this method, several sets of eigenfaces are obtained from all face images, and each template face image is represented by an appropriate set of eigenfaces. Recognition was performed using the distance between the input image and the labelled template image stored in the face database, where the distance is the difference of the feature values that are obtained from the set of eigenfaces indicated by the labelled template image. Simulation results show that the proposed mixture-of-eigenfaces method outperforms the eigenface method in terms of recognition accuracy for face images with pose and illumination variations.

Gabor feature based classification using the enhanced fisher linear discriminant model for face recognition

This paper introduces a novel Gabor-Fisher (1936) classifier (GFC) for face recognition. The GFC method, which is robust to changes in illumination and facial expression, applies the enhanced Fisher linear discriminant model (EFM) to an augmented Gabor feature vector derived from the Gabor wavelet representation of face images. The novelty of this paper comes from 1) the derivation of an augmented Gabor feature vector, whose dimensionality is further reduced using the EFM by considering both data compression and recognition (generalization) performance; 2) the development of a Gabor-Fisher classifier for multi-class problems; and 3) extensive performance evaluation studies. In particular, we performed comparative studies of different similarity measures applied to various classifiers. We also performed comparative experimental studies of various face recognition schemes, including our novel GFC method, the Gabor wavelet method, the eigenfaces method, the Fisherfaces method, the EFM method, the combination of Gabor and the eigenfaces method, and the combination of Gabor and the Fisherfaces method. The feasibility of the new GFC method has been successfully tested on face recognition using 600 FERET frontal face images corresponding to 200 subjects, which were acquired under variable illumination and facial expressions. The novel GFC method achieves 100% accuracy on face recognition using only 62 features.

Fast feature extraction method for robust face verification

A feature extraction technique for face verification is proposed. It utilises polynomial coefficients derived from 2D discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of neighbouring blocks. Experimental results suggest that the technique is more robust against illumination direction changes than 2D Gabor wavelets, 2D DCT and eigenface methods. Moreover, compared to Gabor wavelets, the proposed technique is over 80 times quicker to compute.

A shape- and texture-based enhanced Fisher classifier for face recognition

This paper introduces a new face coding and recognition method, the enhanced Fisher classifier (EFC), which employs the enhanced Fisher linear discriminant model (EFM) on integrated shape and texture features. Shape encodes the feature geometry of a face while texture provides a normalized shape-free image. The dimensionalities of the shape and the texture spaces are first reduced using principal component analysis, constrained by the EFM for enhanced generalization. The corresponding reduced shape and texture features are then combined through a normalization procedure to form the integrated features that are processed by the EFM for face recognition. Experimental results, using 600 face images corresponding to 200 subjects of varying illumination and facial expressions, show that (1) the integrated shape and texture features carry the most discriminating information followed in order by textures, masked images, and shape images, and (2) the new coding and face recognition method, EFC, performs the best among the eigenfaces method using L(1) or L(2) distance measure, and the Mahalanobis distance classifiers using a common covariance matrix for all classes or a pooled within-class covariance matrix. In particular, EFC achieves 98.5% recognition accuracy using only 25 features.

Wavelet packet analysis for face recognition

A novel method for recognition of frontal views of human faces under roughly constant illumination is presented. The proposed scheme is based on the analysis of a wavelet packet decomposition of the face images. Each face image is first located and then, described by a subset of band filtered images containing wavelet coefficients. From these wavelet coefficients, which characterize the face texture, we build compact and meaningful feature vectors, using simple statistical measures. Then, we show how an efficient and reliable probabilistic metric derived from the Bhattacharrya distance can be used in order to classify the face feature vectors into person classes. Experimental results are presented using images from the FERET and the FACES databases. The efficiency of the proposed approach is analyzed according to the FERET evaluation procedure and by comparing our results with those obtained using the well-known Eigenfaces method.

Face recognition using the nearest feature line method

In this paper, we propose a novel classification method, called the nearest feature line (NFL), for face recognition. Any two feature points of the same class (person) are generalized by the feature line (FL) passing through the two points. The derived FL can capture more variations of face images than the original points and thus expands the capacity of the available database. The classification is based on the nearest distance from the query feature point to each FL. With a combined face database, the NFL error rate is about 43.7-65.4% of that of the standard eigenface method. Moreover, the NFL achieves the lowest error rate reported to date for the ORL face database.

Vehicle sound signature recognition by frequency vector principal component analysis

The sound (engine, noise, etc.) of a working vehicle provides an important clue, e.g., for surveillance mission robots, to recognize the vehicle type. In this paper, we introduce the "eigenfaces method", originally used in human face recognition, to model the sound frequency distribution features. We show that it can be a simple and reliable acoustic identification method if the training samples can be properly chosen and classified. We treat the frequency spectra of about 200 ms of sound (a "frame") as a vector in a high-dimensional frequency feature space. In this space, we study the vector distribution for each kind of vehicle sound produced under similar working conditions. A collection of typical sound samples is used as the training data set. The mean frequency vector of the training set is first calculated, and subtracted from each vector in the set. To capture the frequency vectors' variation within the training set, we then calculate the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of the zero-mean-adjusted sample data set. These eigenvectors represent the principal components of the vector distribution: for each such eigenvector, its corresponding eigenvalue indicates its importance in capturing the variation distribution, with the largest eigenvalues accounting for the most variance within this data set. Thus for each set of training data, its mean vector and its moat important eigenvectors together characterize its sound signature. When a new frame (not in the training set) is tested, its spectrum vector is compared against the mean vector; the difference vector is then projected into the principal component directions, and the residual is found. The coefficients of the unknown vector, in the training set eigenvector basis subspace, identify the unknown vehicle noise in terms of the classes represented in the training set. The magnitude of the residual vector measures the extent to which the unknown vehicle sound cannot be well characterized by the vehicle sounds included in the training set.

Dual eigenspace method for human face recognition

The authors present an effective scheme called the dual eigenspace method (DEM) for automated face recognition. Based on the K-L transform, the dual eigenspaces are constructed by extracting algebraic features of training samples and applied to face identification with a two-layer minimium distance classifier. Experimental results show that DEM is significantly better than the traditional eigenface method (TEM).

HMM-based architecture for face identification

This paper describes an approach to the problem of face identification which uses Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to represent the statistics of facial images. HMMs have previously been used with considerable success in speech recognition. Here we describe how two-dimensional face images can be converted into one-dimensional sequences to allow similar techniques to be applied. We investigate the factors that affect the choice of model type and model parameters. We show how a HMM can be used to automatically segment face images and extract features that can be used for identification. Successful results are obtained when facial expression, face details and lighting vary. Small head orientation changes are also tolerated. Experiments are described which assess the performance of the HMM-based approach and the results are compared with the well-known Eigenface method. For the given test set of 50 images, the HMM approach performs favourably. We conclude by summarizing the benefits of using HMMs in this area, and indicate future directions of work.