International Journal of Machine Intelligence, ISSN: 09752927, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010, pp-74-83

2D Face Recognition Techniques: A Survey

1

Patil A.M. , Kolhe S.R. and Patil P.M.

Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, J.T.Mahajan College of Engineering,

Faizpur, India, E-mail: a_m_patil21@rediffmail.com
2
Department of Computer Science, North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon, India, srkolhe2000@gmail.com
3
Department of Electronics Engineering, Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune,
patil_pm@rediffmail.com
Abstract- Numerous recent events, such as radical attacks, exposed stern weakness in most sophisticated
security systems. Various supervision agencies are now more motivated to improve security data based on
body or behavioral distinctiveness, often called biometrics. Pin or password-based authentication
procedures are too easy to lacerate. Face recognition is non-intrusive since it is based on images based on
recorded by a distant camera, and can be very effective even if the user is not aware of the existence of the
face recognition system. The human face is undoubtedly the most common characteristic used by humans
to recognize other people. Face recognition presents a challenging problem in the field of Pattern
Recognition. It has wide range of applications such as; law enforcement, banking, logical access control,
immigration, national identity. In this paper, an overview of some of the well- known methods in various
categories are discussed.
Keywords: Biometric, Face recognition, PCA, LDA, ICA, Neural Networks, Pose, Illumination.
Introduction:
Face recognition is one of the most important
biometric which seems to be a good compromise
between actuality and social reception and
balances security and privacy well. Also it has a
variety of potential applications in information
security, law enforcement, access controls
[1].Face recognition system fall into two
categories: verification and identification. Face
verification is a 1:1 match that compares a face
images against a template face images, whose
identity being claimed .On the contrary, face
identification is a 1: N problem that compares a
query face image against all image templates in a
face database [2]. In last decade, major
advances occurred in face recognition, with many
systems capable of achieving recognition rates
greater than 90%. However real-world scenarios
remain a challenge, because face acquisition
process can undergo to a wide range of
variations. There are five key factors that can
significantly affect system face recognition
performances:
Illumination variations due to skin reflectance
properties and due to the internal camera control.
Several 2D methods do well in recognition tasks
only under moderate illumination variation, while
performances noticeably drop when both
illumination and pose changes occur.
Pose changes affect the authentication process,
because they introduce projective deformations
and self-occlusion. Even if methods dealing with
up to 320 head rotation exists, they do not solve
the problem considering that security cameras
can create viewing angles that are outside of this
range when positioned. On the contrary, with
exception of extreme expressions such as
scream, the algorithms are relatively robust to
facial expression.
Another important factor is the time delay,
because the face changes over time, in a

nonlinear way over long periods. In general this

problem is harder to solve with respect to the
others and not much has been done especially
for age variations.
At last, occlusions can dramatically affect face
recognition performances, in particular if they
located on the upper-side of the face, as
documented in literature.
Categorization
of
methods
for
face
recognition
Face recognition algorithms are divided by [3]
into three categories, as follows
1. Holistic methods:- these methods identify a
face using the whole face images as a input the
main challenge faced by these methods is how to
address the extremely small size problem.
2. Feature based methods:- these methods
used the local facial features for recognition.
Care should be taken when deciding how to
incorporate global configurationally information
into local face methods
3. Hybrid methods:- these methods used both
feature-based and holistic features to recognize a
face. These methods have the potential to offer
better performance than individual holistic or
feature based method [1]
In order to evaluate how well proposed method
works, several databases of face images have
been built. A table 1 gives some details about the
databases.
Automatic face recognition
(Linear, nonlinear projection)
Automatic face recognition Fig (1) can be seen
as pattern recognition problem which is hard to
solve due to its nonlinearity. We can think of it as
a template matching problem, where recognition

Copyright 2010, Bioinfo Publications, International Journal of Machine Intelligence, ISSN: 09752927, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010

2D Face Recognition Techniques: A Survey

has to be performing in a high dimensionality

space. Since higher the dimension of space is,
more the computations are needed to find the
match. A dimensionality reduction technique is
used to project the problem in a lower
dimensionality space. Eigen faces [4] can be
considered as one of the first approaches in this
sense Kirby and Sirovich (1990) adopted the
PCA. Nevertheless, one important date for face
recognition was beginning of the 90s when Turk
and Pentland implemented the Eigenfaces
approach [5, 6], which is surely the most popular
face recognition method. This was the beginning
of the appearance based methods for face
recognition [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. After
Eigenfaces, different statistical approaches have
appeared that improve the results of Eigenfaces
under certain constraints. Many holistic methods
are based on Eigen face decomposition. Here
face images are represented as vectors by
concatenating the pixels of the image line-by-line.
Then the average vector is computed that
represents a mean face. Also, a difference vector
is computed for each user to qualify the
differences to the mean face. Then the
covariance matrix of the difference vectors is
computed. Finally, principal axes can be obtained
by eigen decomposition of covariance matrix.
The first N eigenvectors presenting the highest
eigen values will be retained and represents the
most significant features of faces. Finally, each
user model is represented as a linear
combination (weighted sum) of coefficients
corresponding to each eigenface [13]. As the
PCA Fig (2) is performed only for training the
system, this method results to be very fast, when
testing new face images.

The LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis [14, 15]

has been proposed as a better alternative to the
PCA. It expressly provides discrimination among
the classes, while the PCA deals with the input
data in their entirety, without paying any attention
for the underlying structure. Indeed the main aim
of the LDA consists in finding a base of vectors
providing the best discrimination among the

classes, trying to maximize the between-class

differences, minimizing the within-class ones.

The between- and within-class differences are

represented by the corresponding scatter
matrices Sb and Sw, while the ratio
detjSbj/detjSwj has to be maximized. Even if the
LDA is often considered to outperform the PCA,
an important qualification has to be done. Indeed
the
LDA
provides
better
classification
performances only when a wide training set is
available, and some results discussed by[15],
confirm this thesis. Besides recent studies also
strengthen this argument expressly tackling this
problem referred to as the SSS (Small Sample
Size) problem. In some approaches, such as the
Fisherfaces [16], the PCA is considered as a
preliminary step in order to reduce the
dimensionality of the input space, and then the
LDA Fig (3) is applied to the resulting space, in
order to perform the real classification. However
it has been demonstrated in recent works [17, 18]
that, combining in this way PCA and LDA;
discriminant information together with redundant
one is discarded. Thus, in some cases the LDA is
applied directly on the input space, as in [17, 18].
Lu et al[14] proposed an hybrid between the
DLDA (Direct LDA) and the F-LDA (Fractional
LDA), a variant of the LDA, in which weighed
functions are used to avoid that output classes,
which are too close, can induce a
misclassification of the input. The main
disadvantage of the PCA, LDA, and Fisherfaces
is their linearity. Particularly the PCA extracts a
low-dimensional representation of the input data
only exploiting the covariance matrix, so that no
more than first- and second order statistics are
used. Independent component analysis (ICA) is
currently popular in the field of signal processing;
it has been developed recently as an effective
feature extraction technique and has been
applied to image discrimination.[19,20] proposed
using ICA for face representation and found that
it was better than PCA when cosine was used as
the similarity measure [19,20,21,22]. Petridis and
Perantonis revealed the relationship between ICA

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Patil AM, Kolhe SR and Patil PM

and LDA from the viewpoint of mutual information

[23]. In[19] show that first- and second order
statistics hold information only about the
amplitude spectrum of an image, discarding the
phase-spectrum, while some experiments bring
out that the human capability in recognizing
objects is mainly driven by the phase-spectrum.
This is the main reason for which in[19] the ICA
are introduced as a more powerful classification
tool for the face recognition
problem.

The ICA can be considered as a generalization of

the PCA, but providing three main advantages:
(1) It allows a better characterization of data in an
n-dimensional space; (2) the vectors found by the
ICA are not necessarily orthogonal, so that they
also reduce the reconstruction error; (3) they
capture discriminant features not only exploiting
the covariance matrix, but also considering the
high-order statistics. Besides linear projection
analysis technologies, non-linear projection
analysis represented by both KPCA and KFD
also has aroused considerable interest in the
fields of pattern recognition and machine
learning, and over the last few years have shown
great potential in biometrics applications. KPCA
was originally developed by chlkopf [24], while
KFD was first proposed by Mika [25,26].
Subsequent research saw the development of a
series
of
KFD
algorithms
[27,28,29,
30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. The KFD algorithms
developed by Mika, Billings and Cawley are
formulated for two classes, while those of
Baudat, Roth and Yangare formulated for
multiple classes. Because of its ability to extract
the most discriminatory on-linear features, KFD

has been found very effective in many real-world

biometrics applications. Yang, Liu, Yang, and Xu
used KPCA (KFD) for face feature extraction and
recognition and showed that KPCA (KFD)
outperforms the classical PCA (LDA) [38, 39, 40,
41, 42, 43].
The neural networks
A further nonlinear solution to the face
recognition problem is given by the neural
networks, largely used in many other pattern
recognition problems, and readapted to cope the
people authentication task. The advantage of
neural classifiers over linear ones is that they can
reduce
misclassifications
among
the
neighborhood classes. The basic idea is to
consider a net with a neuron for every pixel in the
image. Nevertheless, because of the pattern
dimensions (an image has a dimension of about
112 92 pixels) neural networks are not directly
trained with the input images, but they are
preceded by the application of such a
dimensionality reduction technique. A first
solution to this problem has been given by[44],
which introduced a second neural net, that
operates in auto-association mode. At first, the
face image, represented by a vector x, is
approximated by a new vector h with smaller
dimensions by the first network (autoassociation), and then h is finally used as input
for the classification net. Cottrell and Fleming [44]
also shown that this kind of neural network does
not behave better than the Eigenfaces even if in
optimal circumstances. Other kind of neural
networks also have been tested in face
recognition, in order to exploit their particular
properties. For examples Self Organizing Map
(SOM) are invariant with respect to minor
changes in the image sample, while convolutional
networks provide a partial invariance with respect
to rotations, translations and scaling. In general,
the structure of the network is strongly dependent
on its application field, so that different contexts
result in quite different networks. In a recent
work, [45] presented the Probabilistic Decision
Based Neural Network, which they modeled for
three different applications (a face detector, an
eyes localizer and a face recognizer). The
flexibility of these networks is due to their
hierarchical structure with nonlinear basis
functions and a competitive credit assignment
scheme, which shown the capability of
recognizing up to 200 people. At last, [46]
introduced a hybrid approach, in which, through
the PCA, the most discriminating features are
extracted and used as the input of a RBF neural
network. The RBFs perform well for face
recognition problems, as they have a compact
topology and learning speed is fast. In their work
the authors also face the problem of the over
fitting: the dimension of the network input is
comparable to the size of the training set; of the

76 Copyright 2010, Bioinfo Publications, International Journal of Machine Intelligence, ISSN: 09752927, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010

2D Face Recognition Techniques: A Survey

overtraining: high dimension of the input results

in slow convergence, small sample size: the
sample size has to exponentially grow for having
a real estimate of the multivariate densities when
the dimension increases; the singular problem: if
the number of training patterns is less than the
number of features, the covariance matrix is
singular. In general, neural networks based
approaches encounter problems when the
number of classes increases. Moreover, they are
not suitable for a single model image recognition
task, because multiple model images per person
are necessary in order for training the system to
optimal parameter setting.
Gabor filters and wavelets
The Gabor filters represent a powerful tool both
in image processing and image coding, thanks to
their capability to capture important visual
features, such as spatial localization, spatial
frequency and orientation selectivity. In the most
cases the Gabor filters are then used to extract
the main features from the face images. Indeed,
in [47] they have been applied to specific areas of
the face region, corresponding to nodes of a rigid
grid. In each node of the grid the Gabor
coefficients are extracted and combined in jets.
The nodes are linked to form such a Dynamic
Link Architecture, so that the comparisons among
different subjects can be made by means of a
graph matching strategy. [48] Further expanded
on DLA and developed a Gabor wavelet based
elastic bunch graph matching method (EBGM) to
label and recognize human faces. Furthermore,
comparisons are made in two consecutive steps:
a rigid alignment of the grid only accounts for
global transformations, such as translations and
scale, then the local misplacement of the grid
nodes is evaluated by means of a Graph
Similarity Function. Generally, dynamic link
architecture is superior to other face recognition
techniques, in terms of rotation invariant;
however,
the
matching
process
is
computationally expensive. Perronnin and
Dugelay [49] proposed a further deformable
model, whose philosophy is similar to the EBGM.
They introduced a novel probabilistic deformable
model of face mapping, based on a bidimensional extension of the 1D-HMM (Hidden
Markov Model). Given a template face FT, a
query face FQ and a deformable model M, the
proposed method try to maximize the likelihood
P(FTjFQ,M). There are two main differences
between this method and the original EGM. First
of all the HMM is extended to the 2D case to
estimate P (FTjFQ, M), automatically training all
the parameters of M, so taking into account for
the elastic properties of the different parts of the
face. Secondly, the model M is shared among all
faces, so the approach works well also when little
enrolment data is available. On the contrary, a
quite different approach has been proposed by

[49]. A mother wavelet is defined and forty Gabor

filters are derived, considering five scales and
eight orientations. Each of these filters is
convolute with the input image, resulting in forty
filtered copies of the face image. To encompass
all the features produced by the different Gabor
kernels, the resulting Gabor wavelet features are
concatenated to derive an augmented Gabor
feature vector. Then, in order to reduce the
dimensionality of the feature vector, both the
PCA and the Enhanced Fisher Linear
Discriminant Model (EFM) are investigated. The
use of Gabor filters renders this method very
robust to changes in expression and illumination;
however they dramatically increase the
computational cost of the method, requiring that
each kernel is convolved with the input image. A
faster wavelet based approach has been
proposed by Garcia et al. [50], which presented a
novel method for recognition of frontal views of
faces under roughly constant illumination. It is
based on the analysis of a wavelet packet
decomposition of the face images, because very
fast implementations of this procedure are
available in hardware. 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, they build compact
and meaningful feature vectors, using simple
statistical measures. Then, they 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
persons classes, so that even very simple
statistical features can provide a good basis for
face classification. Then, in order to reduce the
dimensionality of the feature vector, both the
PCA and the Enhanced Fisher Linear
Discriminant Model (EFM) are investigated. The
use of Gabor filters renders this method very
robust to changes in expression and illumination;
however they dramatically increase the
computational cost of the method, requiring that
each kernel is convolved with the input image. A
faster wavelet based approach has been
proposed by [50]which presented a novel method
for recognition of frontal views of faces under
roughly constant illumination. It is based on the
analysis of a wavelet packet decomposition of the
face images, because very fast implementations
of this procedure are available in hardware. 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,
they build compact and meaningful feature
vectors, using simple statistical measures. Then,
they 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

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Patil AM, Kolhe SR and Patil PM

classes, so that even very simple statistical

features can provide a good basis for face
classification.
Open questions in face recognition
The Automatic Face Recognition (AFR) can be
thought as a very complex object recognition
problem, where the object to be recognized is the
face. This problem is even more difficult to solve,
since the search is done among objects
belonging to the same class. The sensibility of
the classifiers to illumination and pose variations
are the main problems researchers have been
facing until now, while a smaller effort has been
made to cope with occlusions and age variation
problems. Therefore, recent works can be
classified depending on their main contribution in
order to address some of these problems.
The changes in illumination
Ambient lighting changes greatly within and
between days and among indoor and outdoor
environments. Due to the 3D structure of the
face, a direct lighting source can cast strong
shadows that accentuate or diminish certain
facial features. It has been shown experimentally
and theoretically for systems based on Principal
Component Analysis that differences in
appearance induced by illumination are larger
than differences between individuals. Since
dealing with illumination variation is a central
topic in computer vision numerous approaches
for illumination invariant face recognition have
been proposed. In [51], investigate the way, in
which changes in illumination can affect
performances of some face recognition methods.
They define three different classes in order to
grade the methods: the shape from shading
approaches, which extract the shape information
of the face, from one or more of its views, the
representation based methods, which try to get a
characterization of the face invariant to
illumination changes and the generative
methods, which produce a wide set of synthetic
images containing as variations as possible. The
authors deduced that none of the experimented
technique (edge map, 2D Gabor Filters, first and
second derivatives of the gray level images) is
able to solve the problem by itself and the results
they report seems to confirm this hypothesis.
Notwithstanding this, several efforts have been
made in order to achieve better performances in
uncontrolled conditions. Indeed, [52] extended
the edge map technique defining a new
approach, namely the Line Edge Map, in which
the face contours are extracted and combined in
segments, which are then organized in lines. The
Hausdorff distance has also been modified in
order to manage these new feature vectors.
Besides, they also describe a new prefiltering
criterion for screening the whole set of individuals
before to perform the real testing operation. The

method has been tested on several conditions for

pose and illumination and the results show that
this approach outperforms other methods, such
as Linear Subspaces or Eigenfaces, presented in
[16]However, the Fisherfaces remain superior
thanks to their capability to maximize the
between-person variability, minimizing the withinperson differences. This suggests that combining
several linear methods, performances can be
further improved. Indeed, an in-depth study on
the performances of the linear methods when
changes in illumination occur has been
conducted by [53]. The examined techniques
have been compared with respect to both
recognition rate and time/memory complexity.
The authors observe that the LDA combined with
a generalization of the SVD (Singular Value
Decomposition), outperforms all the other
methods. Nevertheless this hybrid is less
adaptable to general face recognition problems,
owning to its computational cost. Therefore, the
authors suggest that to combine the LDA with the
QR decomposition could represent the optimal
choice in most cases, since it provides almost
comparable performances with the LDA/ SVD
approach with a lower cost. On the contrary, the
PCA and the PCA + LDA (Fisherfaces) perform
worse of all the other methods. To overcome
limits introduced by the linearity of the above
mentioned strategies, nonlinear methods, such
as the ICA, have been studied. One of the most
recent work has been proposed by[54]. The face
is split in different regions that overlap. on the
boundaries. For each class containing all the
elements belonging to the same face region the
residual space (the space spanned by the PCA
after removing a few leading Eigenfaces) is
computed and the ICA is applied to. The results
underline that the PCA components in the
residual space are the same that in the normal
space, while ICA components are different, so
that performances improve. Moreover, to split the
face in several regions simplifies the statistical
model of the illumination variations, making the
recognition task more robust with respect to
changes. On the contrary, not much has been
made yet on generative methods. One of the few
generative methods has been proposed by [55].
The face shape and the albedo are extracted by
few subject images, by means of a shape from
shading algorithm.
The changes in pose
In many face recognition scenarios the pose of
the probe and gallery images is different. For
example, the gallery image might be a frontal
mug-shot and the probe image might be a 3/4
view captured from a camera in the corner of a
room. Approaches addressing pose variation can
be classified into two main categories depending
on the type of gallery images they use. Multi-view
face recognition is a direct extension of frontal

78 Copyright 2010, Bioinfo Publications, International Journal of Machine Intelligence, ISSN: 09752927, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010

2D Face Recognition Techniques: A Survey

face recognition in which the algorithms require

gallery images of every subject at every pose. In
face recognition across pose we are concerned
with the problem of building algorithms to
recognize a face from a novel viewpoint, i.e. a
viewpoint from which it has not previously been
seen. Linear subspaces have been extended in
order to deal also with the problem of pose
changes. Indeed[56] present a framework for
recognizing faces with large 3D pose variations,
by means of parametric linear subspace model
for representing each known person in the
gallery. The authors investigate two different
linear models: (1) the LPCMAP model, that is a
parametric linear subspace model, combining the
linear
subspaces
spanned
by
principal
components (PCs) of training samples and the
linear transfer matrices, which associate
projection coefficients of training samples onto
the subspaces and their corresponding 3D head
angles; (2) the PPLS model, that extends the
LPCMAP by using the piecewise linear approach,
that is a set of local linear models, each one
providing continuous analysis and synthesis
mappings, enabling to generalize to unknown
poses by interpolation. The experimental results
show that the recognition system is robust
against large 3D head pose variations covering
500 rotations along each axis. While significantly
compressing the data size, the PPLS system
performed better than the LPCMAP system.
However, the number of known people is
relatively small and the samples included some
artificiality which might accidentally increase the
performance. Another drawback is that the
recognition systems uses pixel-wise landmark
locations for representing facial shape and
deriving head pose information, but finding
landmark locations in static facial images with
arbitrary head pose is an ill-posed problem.
Then,[57] proposed to use the light-field to
achieve a greater robustness and stability solving
the problem of pose variation in face recognition.
The light-field is a 5D function of position (3D)
and orientation (2D), which specifies the radiance
of light in free space. In particular, the authors
apply the PCA to a collection of light-fields of
faces of different subjects, obtaining a set of
eigen light-fields, while the mean light-field could
also be estimated and subtracted from all of the
light-fields. Since, any image of the object
corresponds to a curve in the light-field
The occlusion
One of the main drawbacks of the appearancebased paradigm (e.g., PCA), is its failure to
robustly recognize partially occluded objects.
One way to deal with partially occluded objects
(such as faces) is by using local approaches. In
general, these techniques divide the face into
different parts and then use a voting space to find
the best match. However, a voting technique can

easily misclassify a test image because it does

not take into account how good a local match is.
In [58]in order to cope with this problem, each
face image is divided into k different local parts.
Each of these k local parts is modeled by using a
Gaussian distribution (or, equivalently, with a
mixture of Gaussians), which accounts for the
localization error problem. Given that the mean
feature vector and the covariance matrix for
every local subspace are drawn out and the
probability of a given match can be directly
associated with the sum of all k Mahalanobis
distances. This approach differs from previous
local PCA methods in that it uses a probabilistic
approach rather than a voting space. In his work
the author investigates on the amount of the
occlusion that can be handled by the proposed
approach, and the minimum number of local
areas needed to successfully identify a partially
occluded
face.
Martinez
demonstrated
experimentally that the suppression of 1/6 of the
face does not decrease accuracy, while even for
those cases where 1/3 of the face is occluded,
the identification results are very close to those
obtained without occlusions. He also has shown
that worse results are obtained when the eye
area is occluded rather than the mouth area. The
probabilistic approach proposed by Martinez is
only able to identify a partially occluded face,
while [59] proposed a method that also
reconstructs the occluded part of the face and
detects the occluded regions in the input image,
by means of an auto-associative neural network.
At first the network is trained on the non-occluded
images in normal conditions, while during the
testing the original face can be reconstructed by
replacing occluded regions with the recalled
pixels. The training data set consisted of ninety
three 18 25, 8-bits images, while the trained
network has been tested using three types of test
data: pixel-wise, rectangular, and sunglass. In the
results the authors claim that the classification
performance is not decreased even if 20 30% of
the face images is occluded. On the other hand,
this method suffers from two of the main
problems of the NN based approaches: the
system retraining in case of new enrolments and
the little availability of training samples.
Moreover, a method, which is able to deal with
both occlusions and illumination changes, has
been proposed by [60].They presented a
complete scheme for face recognition based on
salient feature extraction
The age
Many of the considered techniques drop in
performances, when the time lapse between the
training and testing images is not negligible. This
makes clear that all the introduced methods do
not take into account for problems due to the age
variations. Some strategies overcome this
problem periodically upgrading the gallery or

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Patil AM, Kolhe SR and Patil PM

retraining the system. Nevertheless this not very

suitable solution only applies to those systems
granting
services,
which
perform
the
authentication, task frequently, while it is
impractical in other situations, such as law
enforcement. Alternatively the age of the subject
could be simulated trying to make the system
more robust with respect to this kind of variation.
Several techniques for the age simulation are
given in literature: Coordinate Transformations,
Facial Composites, Exaggeration of 3D
Distinctive Characteristics, but none of these
methods has been investigated in the face
recognition framework. In a recent work [61, 62]
proposed a new method based on age functions.
Every image in the face database is described by
a set of parameters b, and for each subject the
best age function is drawn depending on his/her
b. The greatest advantage of this approach is
that different subject-based age functions allow
taking into account for external factors which
contribute towards the age variations. The
authors tested this approach on a database of 12
people, with 80 images in the gallery and 85 in
the probe. They reported an improvement of
about 48% and 1215% swapping the probe
and gallery set. In both the experiments the mean
age of the subjects has been simulated, before
performing the recognition task. Notice that the
number of the subject in the database is very
small, emphasizing the absence of a standard
FERET-like database, which systematically
models the age variations. However to improve
the robustness of the face recognition systems
with respect to changes in age is an interesting
and still unexplored aspect in low enforcement
applications, mainly for the prediction of facial
appearance of wanted/missing persons.
There a more general way to state a technique
better than others!
Methods presented in previous sections have
both advantages and drawbacks. State which
one is the best is very difficult and strongly
depends on what is required the system to do.
Moreover, most of these approaches have been
tested on different datasets. One way to make a
more general evaluation is to pick a set of
significant parameters, rather than considering
the recognition rate only the parameter set must
includes several aspects that need to be taken
into account when testing. Examples are number
and database characteristics, probe dimension
and gallery sets, input size and so on. It is quite
interesting to analyze the way in which these
parameters can drive a more accurate
comparative study of face recognition algorithms
as shown in Table 2. Obviously, the greater the
number of used databases is, the thorough the
assessment of the performances can be. On the
contrary, the connection between the dimension
of the input and the effectiveness of the method

is less self-evident. In general, to speed up

training/testing
tasks,
the
higher
the
computational complexity is, the smaller the
dimension of the input images can be. While it is
clear that more information is carried by larger
input, some studies shows that recognition is still
possible on 18 25 grayscale images [60].
However, high resolution images and videos
made possible by recent technologies and
presented in the upcoming FRVT2005 confirm
that the higher the resolution is, the better
performances are. The probe and gallery set size
also has to be taken into account mainly with
respect to the SSS problem. It is well known that
only one image is available for training in most
real situations, while the identification is
performed many times. This suggests that the
smaller the gallery set is, the higher the capability
of extracting discriminant features is. This can be
further improved by a large probe set. It makes
sense then to minimize the ratio (gallery
size)/(probe size). Many research results show
that several approaches are more sensitive to
changes in high frequencies than to low ones
[63]. This is not a desirable property, because
low frequencies carry most of the invariant
information about the identity of the subject, while
high frequencies are often affected by changes in
environmental
conditions.
Therefore,
the
usefulness of a time lapse between sessions
providing the images of the gallery and probe set
becomes apparent. Thus, the larger the number
of the addressed problems as shown in Table 3.
is, the higher the adaptability to real-world
applications can be esteemed. Finally, all the
methods exposed so far require some kind of
input preprocessing; and this could significantly
reduce the usefulness of a face recognition
algorithm suggesting that the system flexibility
increases when normalization on input data is
reduced.
Based on these considerations is then possible to
investigate which techniques provide a better
approximation of pinpointed parameters. The
PDBNN based algorithm seems to provide the
best experimentation. It addresses most of the
problems, while experiments conducted on three
different databases with a large number of
images reported a high recognition rate. As
further example, the LEM approach can be
considered. The recognition rate is lower than
other methods such as Th-Infrared [63] or [64],
but it has been tested on more databases and it
addresses three different problems rather than
one.
Conclusion
PCA gave average results in case of the
illumination and pose variation databases. In
case of the dataset, where the training set was
small and subject number large, PCA outranked
all the other algorithms. In terms of computational

80 Copyright 2010, Bioinfo Publications, International Journal of Machine Intelligence, ISSN: 09752927, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010

2D Face Recognition Techniques: A Survey

efficiency, LDA is certainly more preferable. It

gels extremely well with all the distance
measures, and the average performance is
consistent, in contrast with ICA where the
consistency level is lower. Gabor representation
gives average recognition results. For face
recognition and feature extraction KPCA and
KFD performs well than classical PCA and LDA.
However, the number of 2D face recognition
algorithms is immense and they enclose huge
variety approaches, so it would be impossible to
make an exhaustive enumeration of all
publication related with 2D face recognition.
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2D Face Recognition Techniques: A Survey

Table 1- Most important 2D Face Image Databases

Dataset
MIT
Database
FERET
Database
UMIST
Database
University
of
Bern
Database
Yale
Database
AT&T(Oliv
etti)
Database
AR face
Database

Location
ftp://whitechapel.media.mit.edu/pub/i
mages/
http://www.nist.gov/humanid/feret

M2VTS
Database

http://Poseidon.csd.auth.gr/M2VTS/i
ndex.html

http://images.ee.umist.ac.uk/danny/d
atabase.html
ftp://iamftp.unibe.ch/pub/Images/Fac
eImages/

Description
Faces of 16 people, 27 of each under various
illumination conditions, scale and head orientation.
A large collection of male and female faces. Images
have neutral and non neutral expressions.
564 images of 20 subjects. The users are captured
under variety of poses.
300 frontal face images of 30 people and 150 profile
face images.

http://cvc.yale.edu/projects/yalefaces
/
http://www.uk.research.att.com

Faces of 15users and total of 165 images. The lighting

conditions are well controlled.
Contains 10 images for each of its 40 subjects, with
various lighting conditions and facial expression.

http://rvli.ecn.purdue.edu/~aleix/

4000 color images corresponding to126 peoples faces

(70 men and 56 women). Images feature frontal view
faces with different facial expression, illumination
condition, and occlusions
A multimodal database containing various images
sequences

Table 2- List of face recognition methods

Approach
Representative work
PCA
4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13
LDA
14,15,17,18
FLDA
16
CA
19,20,21,22
KPCA
24
KFD
25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37
KPCA
38,39,40,41,42,43
NN
44,45,46
GABOR FILTERS AND WAVELETS
47,48,49,50
Table 3- Problems addressed and work
Problem addressed
Work done
Changes in illumination 51,52,53,54,55
Changes in pose
56,57,58,59

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