FACE RECOGNITION

In this chapter, human face has been identified as a key to

security and can be used for a wide variety of applications in both
law enforcement as well as non-law enforcement.

Facial

recognition records the spatial geometry of distinguishing features

of the face. Face images are identified based on Eigen face
approach using PCA. PCA extracts only the components with the
largest magnitudes and the dimensionality reduction removes the
unwanted information. The face structure is precisely decomposed
into uncorrelated components known as eigen faces and will be
stored as a 1-D array which is actually a weighted sum of the
components. In eigen face approach, after the dimensionality
reduction of the face space, the distance is measured between the
image under consideration and the template. When the distance is
less than some set threshold value, then it is identified as a known
face.

1.1 Introduction
Due to the easiness in collection of data, face recognition, which started to evolve as
early as 1936 focusing just on still images, is a widely accepted biometric. Decades of
research efforts have brought out feasible, machine recognition based techniques that use
computer to work more systematically even for video images and is used in a number of
applications including crowd surveillance, criminal identification, access to entry etc. The
state-of-the-art face recognition techniques have reached a certain stage of maturity but are
still limited to specific environments with constraints like illumination change or pose
variation.
In general, the human recognition system utilizes a broad spectrum of stimuli,
obtained from many senses viz. visual, auditory, tactile etc., in individual or collective
manner for the purpose of recognition. For contextual knowledge, the surroundings play an
important role implying that holistic and feature information are crucial for the perception
and recognition of faces. When dominant features are present, holistic descriptions may not

be used. For example, hair, face outline and mouth are determined to be important for
perceiving and remembering front view faces and when it comes to the side view, nose plays
a significant role. The original look of the face changes with the variations in hairstyle,
wearing spectacles, facial hair like beards, aging etc. As face is quite complex, a single
change in a feature of the face can alter its look considerably making face recognition a really
complex task involving visual techniques Error: Reference source not found.
Face recognition is a part of a wide area of pattern recognition technology Error:
Reference source not found. The process includes mainly three tasks - acquisition,
normalization and recognition. The term acquisition refers to the detection and tracking of
face-like image patches in a static scene. Normalization is the segmentation and alignment of
face images while recognition is the representation and modelling of face images as identities
as well as the association of novel face images with known models. Automation of face
recognition algorithms mostly deals with digital image processing, which is a quite complex
field that poses many problems.
The machine recognition of face from stills is an active research area spanning several
disciplines such as image processing, pattern recognition and PCA computer techniques.
Although humans seem to recognise faces in cluttered scenes with relative efficiency,
machine recognition is a much more complex task. Face recognition from a single image is a
challenging task because of variability in scale, location, orientation and pose. Face
localization is an invariable step towards the process of face detection, which aims to
determine the image position of single faces with the assumption that an input image contains
only one face. The face recognition compares an input image against a database and in turn,
reports matched cases.