... This paper provides an up-to-date critical survey of still- and video-based face recognition research. There are two underlying motivations for us to write this survey paper: the first is to provide an up-to-date review of the existing literature, and the second is to offer some insights into the studies of machine recognition of faces. To provide a comprehensive survey, we not only categorize existing recognition techniques but also present detailed descriptions of representative methods within each category. In addition,

Abstract — We consider the problem of automatically recognizing human faces from frontal views with varying expression and illumination, as well as occlusion and disguise. We cast the recognition problem as one of classifying among multiple linear regression models, and argue that new theory from sparse signal representation offers the key to addressing this problem. Based on a sparse representation computed by ℓ 1-minimization, we propose a general classification algorithm for (image-based) object recognition. This new framework provides new insights into two crucial issues in face recognition: feature extraction and robustness to occlusion. For feature extraction, we show that if sparsity in the recognition problem is properly harnessed, the choice of features is no longer critical. What is critical, however, is whether the number of features is sufficiently large and whether the sparse representation is correctly computed. Unconventional features such as downsampled images and random projections perform just as well as conventional features such as Eigenfaces and Laplacianfaces, as long as the dimension of the feature space surpasses certain threshold, predicted by the theory of sparse representation. This framework can handle errors due to occlusion and corruption uniformly, by exploiting the fact that these errors are often sparse w.r.t. to the standard (pixel) basis. The theory of sparse representation helps predict how much occlusion the recognition algorithm can handle and how to choose the training images to maximize robustness to occlusion. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available databases to verify the efficacy of the proposed algorithm, and corroborate the above claims.

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Abstract—Automatic analysis of human facial expression is a challenging problem with many applications. Most of the existing automated systems for facial expression analysis attempt to recognize a few prototypic emotional expressions, such as anger and happiness. Instead of representing another approach to machine analysis of prototypic facial expressions of emotion, the method presented in this paper attempts to handle a large range of human facial behavior by recognizing facial muscle actions that produce expressions. Virtually all of the existing vision systems for facial muscle action detection deal only with frontal-view face images and cannot handle temporal dynamics of facial actions. In this paper, we present a system for automatic recognition of facial action units (AUs) and their temporal models from long, profile-view face image sequences. We exploit particle filtering to track 15 facial points in an input face-profile sequence, and we introduce facial-action-dynamics recognition from continuous video input using temporal rules. The algorithm performs both automatic segmentation of an input video into facial expressions pictured and recognition of temporal segments (i.e., onset, apex, offset) of 27 AUs occurring alone or in a combination in the input face-profile video. A recognition rate of 87 % is achieved. Index Terms—Computer vision, facial action units, facial expression analysis, facial expression dynamics analysis, particle filtering, rule-based reasoning, spatial reasoning, temporal reasoning. I.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been successfully applied to construct linear models of shape, graylevel, and motion. In particular, PCA has been widely used to model the variation in the appearance of people's faces. We extend previous work on facial modeling for tracking faces in video sequences as they undergo significant changes due to facial expressions. Here we develop person-specific facial appearance models (PSFAM), which use modular PCA to model complex intra-person appearance changes. Such models require aligned visual training data; in previous work, this has involved a time consuming and errorprone hand alignment and cropping process. Instead, we introduce parameterized component analysis to learn a subspace that is invariant to affine (or higher order) geometric transformations. The automatic learning of a PSFAM given a training image sequence is posed as a continuous optimization problem and is solved with a mixture of stochastic and deterministic techniques achieving sub-pixel accuracy.

Abstract—Human faces undergo considerable amounts of variations with aging. While face recognition systems have been proven to be sensitive to factors such as illumination and pose, their sensitivity to facial aging effects is yet to be studied. How does age progression affect the similarity between a pair of face images of an individual? What is the confidence associated with establishing the identity between a pair of age separated face images? In this paper, we develop a Bayesian age difference classifier that classifies face images of individuals based on age differences and performs face verification across age progression. Further, we study the similarity of faces across age progression. Since age separated face images invariably differ in illumination and pose, we propose preprocessing methods for minimizing such variations. Experimental results using a database comprising of pairs of face images that were retrieved from the passports of 465 individuals are presented. The verification system for faces separated by as many as nine years, attains an equal error rate of 8.5%. Index Terms—Age progression, face recognition, face verification, probabilistic eigenspaces, similarity measure. I.

We investigate facial asymmetry as a biometric under expression variation. For the first time, we have defined two types of quantified facial asymmetry measures that are easily computable from facial images and videos. Our findings show that the asymmetry measures of automatically selected facial regions capture individual differences that are relatively stable to facial expression variations. More importantly, a synergy is achieved by combining facial asymmetry information with conventional EigenFace and FisherFace methods. We have assessed the generality of these ndings across two publicly available face databases: Using a random subset of 110 subjects from the FERET database, a 38% classification error reduction rate is obtained. Error reduction rates of 45% to 100% are achieved on 55 subjects from the Cohn-Kanade AU-coded facial expression database. These results suggest that facial asymmetry may provide complementary discriminative information to human identification methods, which has been missing in automatic human identification.

Motivated by the success of parts based representations in face detection we have attempted to address some of the problems associated with applying such a philosophy to the task of face verification. Hitherto, a major problem with this approach in face verification is the intrinsic lack of training observations, stemming from individual subjects, in order to estimate the required conditional distributions. The estimated distributions have to be generalized enough to encompass the differing permutations of a subject’s face yet still be able to discriminate between subjects. In our work the well known Gaussian mixture model (GMM) framework is employed to model the conditional density function of the parts based representation of the face. We demonstrate that excellent performance can be obtained from our GMM based representation through the employment of adaptation theory, specifically relevance adaptation (RA). Our results are presented for the frontal images of the BANCA database. 1.

One of the main challenges faced by the current face recognition techniques lies in the difficulties of collecting samples. Fewer samples per person mean less laborious effort for collecting them, lower costs for storing and processing them. Unfortunately, many reported face recognition techniques rely heavily on the size and representative of training set, and most of them will suffer serious performance drop or even fail to work if only one training sample per person is available to the systems. This situation is called “one sample per person ” problem: given a stored database of faces, the goal is to identify a person from the database later in time in any different and unpredictable poses, lighting, etc from just one image. Such a task is very challenging for most current algorithms due to the extremely limited representative of training sample. Numerous techniques have been developed to attack this problem, and the purpose of this paper is to categorize and evaluate these algorithms. The prominent algorithms are described and critically analyzed. Relevant issues such as data collection, the influence of the small sample size, and system evaluation are discussed, and several promising directions for future research are also proposed in this paper.

Abstract—An algorithm is proposed for 3D face recognition in the presence of varied facial expressions. It is based on combining the match scores from matching multiple overlapping regions around the nose. Experimental results are presented using the largest database employed to date in 3D face recognition studies, over 4,000 scans of 449 subjects. Results show substantial improvement over matching the shape of a single larger frontal face region. This is the first approach to use multiple overlapping regions around the nose to handle the problem of expression variation. Index Terms—Biometrics, face recognition, three-dimensional face, facial expression. 1