2014 Sixth International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks

An Extensive Ssurvey on Feature Extraction Techniques for Facial Image Processing

Vivek Pali
DE, RCET,Bhilai(C.G.)

Suchita Goswami
DE, RCET, Bhilai

Lalit P. Bhaiya
ET&T, RCET, Bhilai

vivekpali1986@gmail.com

suchita1.goswami@gmail.com

lalit04_bhaiya@yahoo.com

application [1]. Some significant and useful features from

the digital image are extracted to be subjected to the
selection and classification. The main purpose of the feature
extraction is to minimize the original dataset by deriving
some properties which can be used to classify and to
recognize patterns that are present in the input images. A
feature vector, resulted from feature extraction process,
whose dimension is equal to the number of extracted feature,
is derived. These features should retain the important
information and should be different enough among classes
for a good classification performance. Consequently, the
feature extraction process plays a decisive role in the
classification performance and thus, in the overall
segmentation process.

AbstractIn this research paper an extensive literature survey

on different types of feature extraction techniques is reported.
To provide an extensive survey, we not only categorize existing
feature extraction techniques but also provide detailed
descriptions of representative approaches within each category.
These techniques are simply classified into four major
categories, namely, feature based approach, appearance based
approach, template-based and part-based approaches. The aim
of this paper is to report an illustrative and comparative study
of most popular feature extraction methods which are
generally used in face recognition problems. This paper
provides an up-to-date comprehensive survey of existing face
recognition researches. We are motivated by the lack of direct
and detailed independent comparisons of all possible algorithm
implementations in available literature. After extensive
research on these feature extraction techniques we found that
different feature extraction techniques yield prominent results
for different image processing applications.
Keywords-complexity; processing time; feature-based;
appearance-based;
template-based;
part-based;
machine
recognition

I.

II.

Feature extraction can be performed using various

mathematical models, image processing techniques and
computational intelligent tools such as neural networks or
fuzzy logic. They are generally classified into four
categories, namely, feature based, appearance based,
template-based and part-based approaches. The first three
categories are frequently discussed in literatures, while the
forth category is a new approach employed in recent
computer vision and object recognition. Figure 1 shows the
classification of various feature extraction techniques
employed in previous research works.

INTRODUCTION

Face recognition is a task which can be performed

remarkably easily and successfully by humans. This
simplicity was shown to be dangerously misleading as the
automatic face recognition seems to be a problem that is still
far from solved. Despite more than thirty years of
comprehensive research, a number of papers published in
journals and conferences related to this field, but we still
cannot declare that artificial intelligent systems can measure
to human performance. Face recognition is such a
challenging yet interesting problem that it has attracted
researchers with different backgrounds: psychology, pattern
recognition, neural network, computer graphics and
computer vision. The literature on face recognition
technology is vast and diverse due to this fact. In this paper,
a detailed review of current developments in face
recognition technology is provided. Various algorithms were
proposed and research groups across the world reported
different and often contradictory results when comparing
them. The aim of this survey paper is to provide a
comprehensive and comparative study of four most popular
categories of feature extraction techniques for face
recognition systems in completely equal working conditions
regarding preprocessing and algorithm implementation. We
are motivated by the lack of direct and detailed independent
comparisons of all possible algorithm implementations in
available literature. Features are properties which describe
the whole image. It is a crucial piece of information which is
subjected to solve the computational task relevant to specific
978-1-4799-6929-6/14 $31.00 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CICN.2014.43
10.1109/.43

CLASSIFICATION OF VARIOUS FEATURE EXTRACTION

TECHNIQUES

Figure 1: Classification of various feature extraction techniques

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III.

APPEARANCE-BASED FEATURE EXTRACTION

APPROACH

principle as the eigenfaces method. LDA tries to find a set of

projecting vectors w best discriminating different classes.
According to the Fisher criteria, it can be achieved by
maximizing the ratio of determinant of the between-class
scatter matrix Sb and the determinant of the within-class
scatter matrix Sw. The within class scatter Sw represents
how face images are distributed closely within classes and
between class scatter matrix Sb how classes are separated
from each other. The goal of LDA is to maximize Sb while
minimizing Sw; the images in the training set are divided
into the corresponding classes. LDA finds a set of vectors
such that the fisher discriminant criterion is maximized.

Appearance-based approaches attempt to identify faces

using global representations, i.e., illustrations based on the
entire image instead of local features of the face.
Appearance-based methods also known as holistic-based
methods, that mean we use complete information of a whole
face patch and perform some transformation on this patch to
derive a compact representation for recognition. To be more
clearly differentiated from feature-based techniques, we can
say that feature-based methods directly derive information
from some detected fiducial points like eyes, noses, and lips,
etc. These fiducial points are usually determined from
domain knowledge and discard other information; while
appearance-based methods perform transformations on the
whole patch and reach the feature vector and these
transformation basis are usually obtained from statistics.
During the past thirty years, holistic-based methods attract
the most attention against other approaches, so we will focus
more on this approach. In the following sub-sections, we
will talk about the famous eigenface [2] (performed by the
PCA), fisher face (derived by the LDA), and some other
transformation basis such as the independent component
analysis (ICA), nonlinear dimension reduction technique,
and the over-complete database (based on compressive
sensing). More techniques could be found in [3] & [4].
A. PCA
PCA is a transform that chooses a new coordinate system for
the data set such that the greatest variance by any projection
of the data set comes to reside on the first axis, the second
greatest variance lie on the second axis, and so on. The goal
of PCA is to reduce the dimensionality of the data while
retaining as much as information present in the original
dataset. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), also called as
Karhunen- Loeve expansion. It is a classical feature
extraction and data representation technique which is widely
used in the field of pattern recognition and computer vision
[5]. In 1987, Sirovich and Kirby first used PCA to
efficiently represent pictures of human faces. They argued
that any face image could be reconstructed approximately as
a weighted sum of a small collection of images that define a
facial basis which is known as eigenimages, and a mean
image of the face. Within this context, Turk and Pentland
[2], proposed the popular Eigenfaces method for face
recognition in 1991. Since then, PCA has been widely
investigated and has become one of the most successful
approaches in face recognition. In detail, goal of PCA
method is to reduce the number of dimensions of feature
space, but still to retain principle features to minimize the
loss of information.
B. LDA
The Fishers linear discriminant analysis (LDA) has been
successfully applied to face recognition area in the past few
years. Fisher faces method derives from Fishers linear
discriminant analysis (FLD or LDA); it works on the same

Figure 2: (a) Points in two-dimensional space (b) poor separation (c)

good separation

Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) analysis, also called

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) finds the line that best
separates the points. For example, consider two sets of
points, green and blue in color, in two-dimensional space
being projected onto a single line. Relying on the direction of
the line, the points can either be combined together (Figure
2a) or be separated (Figure 2b). In terminology of face
recognition this means combining images of the similar class
and separate images of different classes. Images are projected
from an N-dimensional space to an M-1 dimensional space,
where N represents the number of pixels in the image and M
represents the number of classes of images [6].
The LDA method, that creates an optimal projection of
the dataset, maximizes the ratio of the determinant of the
between-class scatter matrix of the projected samples to the
determinant of the within-class scatter matrix of the projected
samples. The within-class scatter matrix, also known as intrapersonal matrix, illustrates variations in the appearance of the
same individual due to different lighting illuminations and
facial expression, while the between-class scatter matrix, also
known as the extra-personal, depicts the changes in
appearance due to a difference in the identity. In this way
fisherfaces can project away some variation in lighting and
facial expression while maintaining discriminability [6].
LDA is a 1D-data-based feature extraction technique; so, 2D
image matrices must be converted into 1D image vectors
before the application of LDA. Since the resulting image
vectors are high dimensional, LDA usually encounters the
small sample size (SSS) problem in which the within-class
scatter matrix becomes singular and thus the traditional LDA
algorithm fails to use. To address this problem, a number of
extended LDA algorithms have been suggested. Among
them, the most popular one is to use PCA for dimension
reduction prior to performing LDA, which is used in this
proposed work. Even if we were to compare PCA and LDA,

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it is obvious that LDA should have a great advantage as it

was trained with roughly two times bigger training set. The
problem was identified and researched in detail in Martinez
and Kak, 2001 where it is concluded that when the training
set is small, PCA can outperform LDA. Another important
thing to mention is that LDA is much more sensitive to
different training sets than PCA or ICA. In order to solve this
problem, a weighted between-class scatter matrix is generally
constructed for the Fisher criterion. In such criterion the
classes, which are closer together in the input space, are more
likely to result in misclassification and should therefore be
more heavily weighted in the input space. The
dimensionality is reduced in small fractional steps which
make the relevant distances, which are more correctly
weighted. Similar to classical LDA, the F-LDA is not
capable to solve the small sample size problem (SSSP). The
SSS problem generally exists in high-dimensional pattern
recognition tasks like face recognition, in which the number
of training samples is smaller than the dimensionality of the
input samples, due to two main factors: (1) In the highdimensional space the Eigen decomposition of the betweenclass scatter matrix is very difficult; (2) The singular scatter
matrices are caused by the SSSP. In order to solve the SSSP,
a hybrid technique is needed which combines the advantage
of both the techniques. This thesis presents a hybrid approach
for feature extraction which combines PCA and LDA. This
approach has been verified to be effective by experience. In
this research work, PCA is first utilized for dimensionality
reduction and then the application of LDA is done for the
feature extraction. We are trying to introduce a novel
approach in our proposed work and this approach will be a
complete PCA plus LDA algorithm essentially in addition
with optimal eigenvector selection using genetic algorithm,
and the performance of this algorithm is superior to that of
the previous LDA in face recognition. We demonstrate that
by introducing dimensionality reduction by PCA and feature
extraction through LDA, the features that do not encode
important facial information are rejected, and hence the error
rate can be reduced significantly.
C. ICA
Independent component analysis (ICA) performs on a set of
face images by an unsupervised learning algorithm derived
from the principle of optimal information transfer through
sigmoidal neurons. The approach maximizes the mutual
information between the inputs and the outputs that produce
statistically independent outputs under definite conditions.
The PCA uses the second-order statistical property of the
training set that is covariance matrix and gives projection
bases which makes the projected samples uncorrelated with
each other. The second-order property only depends on the
pair wise relationships between pixels, while some important
information for face recognition may be contained in the
higher-order relationships among pixels. The independent
component analysis (ICA) [7][8] is a generalization of the
PCA, which is sensitive to the higher-order statistics. Figure
3 shows the representation of faces generated by various

appearance based approaches. In the works proposed by

Bartlett et al. [9], they derived the ICA bases from the
principle of optimal information transfer through sigmoidal
neurons. In addition, they proposed to architectures for
dimension-reduction decomposition, one treats the image as
random variables and the pixels as outcomes, and the other
one treats the pixels as random variables and the image as
outcomes. ICA has the following potential advantages over
PCA: 1) It provides a superior probabilistic model of the data
that better recognizes where the data concentrate in ndimensional space. 2) It uniquely identifies the mixing
matrix W. 3) It discovers a not-necessarily orthogonal basis
which may rebuild the data superior than PCA in the
presence of noise. 4) It is sensitive not only to the covariance
matrix but also to high-order statistics in the data.

Figure 3: Representation of PCA faces, ICA-1 faces, ICA-2 faces, and

LDA faces

Advantages and disadvantages of Appearance-based

approach- The main advantage of the appearance-based
approaches is that they do not demolish any of the
information contained in the images by focusing on only
restricted regions or points of interest [10]. However, as we
discussed earlier, this same property is their greatest
drawback too since most of these approaches start out with
the basic assumption that all the pixels in the image are
having equal importance [11]. Consequently, these
techniques are not only computationally expensive but
require a high degree of correlation between the test and
training images, and do not perform effectively under large
variations in pose, scale and illumination, etc. [12].
Nevertheless, as mentioned in the above review, several of
these algorithms have been modified and/or enhanced to
compensate for such variations, and dimensionality reduction
techniques have been exploited. Note that even though such
techniques increase generalization capabilities, the
disadvantage is that they may potentially cause the loss of
discriminative information [13], as a result of which these
approaches appear to yield better classification results than
the feature-based ones in general. In the latest comprehensive
FERET evaluation [14, 15], the probabilistic eigenface [16],
the Fisherface [17] and the EBGM [18] methods were ranked
as the best three techniques for face recognition (Even
though the EBGM method is feature-based in general, its
success depends on its application of holistic neural network
methods at the feature level).

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IV.

FEATURE-BASED APPROACH

recognition is mainly based on employing the response of a

grid that represent the facial topography for encoding the
face. High-energized points can be used in comparisons
which form the basis of this work, instead of using the graph
nodes. This approach not only minimizes computational
complexity, but also improves the classification
performance in the presence of occlusions.

We have briefly compared the differences between holisticbased methods and feature-based methods based on what the
information they use from a given face patch, and in another
point of view, we can say that appearance-based methods
rely more on statistical learning and analysis, while featurebased methods exploit more ideas from image processing,
computer vision, and domain knowledge form human. In
this section, we discus two outstanding features for face
recognition, the Gabor wavelet feature and the local binary
pattern.
A. Gabor Features
The application of Gabor wavelet for face recognition is
pioneered by Lades et al.s work [19]. In their research
work, the elastic graph matching framework is used to find
feature points, build the face model and to perform distance
measurement, while the Gabor wavelets are used for
extracting local features at these feature points, and a set of
complex Gabor wavelet coefficients for each point is called
a jet. Graph matching based methods normally requires two
steps to construct the graph gI for a facial image I and
calculates its similarity with a model graph gM. In the first
step, gM is shifted within the input image to derive the
optimal global offset of gI while retaining its shape rigid.
Then in the second step, each vertex in gI is shifted in a
topological constraint to remunerate the local distortions that
caused by rotations in depth or expression variations. It is
actually the distortion of the vertices which makes the graph
matching procedure elastic. To achieve these two steps, a
cost measure function S(gI, gM) is neccesarily to be defined
and these two steps abort when this cost measure function
reaches the minimum value. Lades et al.s [19] used a
simple rectangular graph to model faces in the database
while each vertex is without the direct object meaning on
faces. In the database building stage, the deformation
process mentioned above is not included, and the
rectangular graph is manually placed on each face and the
features are extracted at individual vertices. When a new
face I comes in, the distance between it and all the faces in
the database are required to calculate, that means if there are
totally N face samples are present in the database, we have
to construct N graphs for I based on each face sample. This
matching process is very computationally expensive
especially for large database. Figure 4 shows an example of
a model graph while figure 5 depicts object-adaptive grids
for difference poses. As we know that, face recognition is
not a difficult task for human beings, selection of
biologically motivated Gabor filters is well suited to the face
recognition problems. Gabor filters are used to model the
responses of simple cells in the primary visual cortex and
they are simply plane waves limited by a Gaussian envelope
function. An image can be characterized by the Gabor
wavelet transform that allow the description of both the
spatial frequency structure and spatial relations. One of the
techniques used in the literature for Gabor based face

Figure 4: The graphic models of face images. The model graph

(a) a face stored in the database (b) a deformed graph

Figure 5: The object-adaptive grids for difference poses.

Unlike the eigenfaces method, elastic graph matching

method is more robust to variations in illumination, since
instead of directly using pixel gray values, Gabor wavelet
transforms of images is being used. However, detection
performance of elastic graph matching method is reported
superior than the eigenfaces method, the elastic graph
matching approach is less attractive for commercial systems,
due to its computational complexity and execution time.
Even though use of 2D Gabor wavelet transform seems to be
suitable to the problem, graph matching makes algorithm
bulky. Furthermore, as the local information is derived from
the nodes of a predefined graph, some details on a face, that
are special features of that face and could be very useful in
recognition task, might be lost. This method is also robust to
variations in illumination as a property of Gabor wavelet,
that is the major problem with the eigenface approaches.
B. Binary Features
With appearance-based methods, image filters, such as
Gabor wavelets, are applied to either the whole-face or
specific face-regions to extract the appearance changes of
the face. Due to their superior performance, the major works
on appearance-based methods have focused on using Gaborwavelet representations [22,23,24,25]. However, it is both
time and memory intensive to convolve face images with a
bank of Gabor filters to extract multi-scale and multiorientational coefficients. In this work, we empirically study
facial representation based on Local Binary Pattern (LBP)
features [25,26] for person-independent facial expression
recognition. LBP features were proposed originally for
texture analysis, and recently have been introduced to
represent faces in facial images analysis. The most
important properties of LBP features are their tolerance
against illumination changes and their computational

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of faces, these methods increase their database to

accommodate much more samples and expect the trained
transformation basis or defined distance metric could
attenuate the intra-class variation while maintaining the
inter-class variation. Traditional template-matching is pretty
much like using distance metric for face recognition, which
means selecting a set of symbolic templates for each class
(person), the similarity measurement is computed between a
test image and each class, and the class with the highest
similarity score is the selected as the correct match.
Recently, deformable template techniques are proposed [28].
In contrast to implicitly modeling intra-class variations (ex.
increasing database), de-formable template methods
explicitly models possible variations of human faces from
training data and are expected to deal with much severe
variations. In this section, we introduce the face recognition
technique based on the ASM and the AAM. During the face
detection process, the AAM will generate a parameter vector
c which could synthesize a face appearance that is best fitted
to the face shown in the image. Then if we have a wellchosen database which contains several significant views,
pose, expressions of each person, we can achieve a set of
AAM parameter vectors to represent each identity. To
compare the input face with the database, Edwards et al.
[29] proposed to use the Mahalonobis distance measure for
each class and generate a class-dependent metric to
encounter the intraclass variation. To better exploit the interclass variation against the intra-class variation, they also
used the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for dimension
reduction and classification task.

simplicity. We examine different machine learning methods,

including template matching, Support Vector Machine
(SVM), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and the linear
programming technique, to perform facial expression
recognition using LBP features. Our study demonstrates
that, compared to Gabor wavelets, LBP features can be
derived very fast in a single scan through the raw image and
lie in low-dimensional feature space, while still retaining
discriminative facial information in a compact
representation. The original LBP operator was introduced by
Ojala et al. [25], and was proved a powerful means of
texture description. The operator labels the pixels of an
image by thresholding a 3x3 neighborhood of each pixel
with the center value and considering the results as a binary
number, and the 256-bin histogram of the LBP labels
computed over a region is used as a texture descriptor. The
derived binary numbers (called Local Binary Patterns or
LBP codes) codify local primitives including different types
of curved edges, spots, flat areas, etc (as shown in Fig. 6), so
each LBP code can be regarded as a micro-texton. The
limitation of the basic LBP operator is its small 3x3
neighborhood which cannot capture dominant features with
large scale.

Figure 6: Basic LBP operator

Advantages and disadvantages of feature-based

approachThe main advantage offered by the featured-based
techniques is that since the extraction of the feature points
precedes the analysis done for matching the image to that of
a known individual, such methods are relatively robust to
position variations in the input image [10]. In principle,
feature-based schemes can be made invariant to size,
orientation and/or lighting [20]. Other benefits of these
schemes include the compactness of representation of the
face images and high speed matching [21]. However, the
geometric feature-based methods usually require accurate
and reliable facial feature detection and tracking, which is
difficult to accommodate in many situations. The major
disadvantage of these approaches is the difficulty of
automatic feature detection (as discussed above) and the fact
that the implementer of any of these techniques has to make
arbitrary decisions about which features are important. After
all, if the feature set lacks discrimination ability, no amount
of subsequent processing can compensate for that intrinsic
deficiency [20].
V.

VI.

PART-BASED APPROACH

There have been several researches exploiting information

from facial characteristic parts or parts that are robust
against pose or illumination variation for face recognition.
To be distinguished from the feature-based category, the
part-based methods detect significant parts from the face
image and combine the part appearances with machine
learning tools for recognition, while the feature-based
methods extract features from facial feature points or the
whole face and compare these features to achieve the
recognition purpose. In this subsection, we introduced two
techniques, one is an extension system of the method and
one is based on the SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform)
features extracted from the face image.
A. Component-based face recognition
Heisele et al. [30] compared the performance of the
component-based face recognition against the global
approaches. In their work, they generated three different
face recognition structures based on the SVM classifier: a
component-based algorithm based on the output of the
component-based face detection algorithm, a global
algorithm directly fed by the detected face appearance, and
finally a global approach which takes the view variation into
account. Given the detected face patches, the two global
approaches have the only difference that whether the view

TEMPLATE-BASED METHODS

The recognition system based on the two methods

introduced above usually perform feature extraction for all
face images stored in the database and train classifiers or
define some metric to compute the similarity of a test face
patch with each class person class. To overcome variations

146

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variation of the detected face is considered. The algorithm

without this consideration directly builds a SVM classifier
for a person based on all possible views, while the one with
this consideration first divides the training images of a
person into several view-specific clusters, and then trains
one SVM cluster for each of them. The SVM classifier is
originally developed for binary classification case, and to
extend for multi-class tasks, the one-versus-all and the pairwise approaches are described. The component-based SVM
classifier is cascaded behind the component-based face
detection algorithm. After a face is detected in the image,
they choose 10 of the 14 detected parts, normalized them in
size and combined their gray values into a single feature
vector. Then a one-versus-all multi-class structure with a
linear SVM for each person is trained for face recognition
purpose. In the experimental results, the component system
outperforms the global systems for recognition rate larger
than 60% because the information fed into the classifiers
capture more specific facial features. In addition, the
clustering leads to a significant improvement of the global
method. This is because clustering generates view-specific
clusters that have smaller intra-class variations than the
whole set of images of a person. Based on these results, they
claimed that a combination of weak classifiers trained on a
properly chosen subsets of the data can outperform a single,
more powerful classifier trained on the whole data.
VII. CONCLUSION
Face recognition is a challenging problem in the field of
image analysis and computer vision that has received a great
deal of attention over the last few years because of its many
applications in various domains. Research has been
conducted vigorously in this area for the past three decades
or so, and though huge progress has been made. Feature
extraction is one of the most popular and fundamental
problems in face recognition tasks. This paper contained a
detailed survey on existing feature extraction techniques for
face recognition. With a number of different databases
available, it is always very difficult to compare different
face recognition algorithms. Even when the same database is
used, researchers may use different protocols for testing.
After reviewing a number of research papers, we found two
main subfields of face recognition approaches which require
improvements to achieve high accuracy and speed and that
are dimensionality reduction and feature extraction
techniques and feature subset selection. In summary, a face
recognition system should not only be able to cope with
variations in illumination, expression and pose, but also
recognize a face in real-time. To speed up the process of
face recognition systems, genetic algorithm can be
incorporated with the existing approaches.
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