Abstract

We consider the problem of feature-based face recognition in the setting where only a single example of each face is available for training. The mixture-distance technique we introduce achieves a recognition rate of 95% on a database of 685 people in which each face is represented by 30 measured distances. This is currently the best recorded recognition rate for a feature-based system applied to a database of this size. By comparison, nearest neighbor search using Euclidean distance yields 84%. In our work a novel distance function is constructed based on local second order statistics as estimated by modeling the training data as a mixture of normal densities. We report on the results from mixtures of several sizes. We demonstrate that a flat mixture of mixtures performs as well as the best model and therefore represents an effective solution to the model selection problem. A mixture perspective is also taken for individual Gaussians to choose between first order (variance) and second ...

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