Face Recognition by Curvelet Transformation on Bit Quantized Facial Images

Punith kumar M B, Lecturer, Dept. of ECE, BGSIT, BG-Nagar, punithpes@gmail.com

Abstract
The wavelet transform have been profusely employed for addressing problems in the face recognition and other problems in computer vision. However, theoretical studies indicate that wavelets are not the ideal image descriptors; they have very crude directional representations and are not anisotrophic. A recent development called the Curvelet Transform tries to overcome these shortcomings of wavelets. In this paper, I proposed a multiresolution Curvelet based method for face recognition. Recognition will be done in three steps. In the first step, the original 8-bit image is quantized to 4-bit and 2-bit representations. In the second steep, each of the 3 different resolved versions of the image are subjected to Curvelet transform at 5 different resolutions. The approximate Curvelet coefficients at each resolution represent a different feature set. In the last step, these fifteen (three bit resolved versions X 5 resolutions) sets of coefficients are then used to train separate Support Vector Machines. During testing, the results of the 15 SVMs are fused to determine the final result. 1. Introduction As a means of biometric technique, face recognition has been studied diligently for more than 30 years now and has emerged as one of the most successful applications of image analysis. Compared to other biometric techniques requiring cooperative subjects such as fingerprint recognition and iris recognition, face recognition might not have a superior level of accuracy, but working with faces certainly has clear advantages of being natural and passive. Face recognition has drawn increasing attention because of its potential applications in many fields, such as identity authentication, information security, surveillance, human-computer interface, and so on. Feature extraction is a key step prior to face recognition. Extraction of a representative feature set can greatly enhance the performance of any face recognition system. 2. Scope of Work Direct use of pixel values as features is not possible due to huge dimensionality of the images. One way to handle huge dimensionality in face recognition problems is to employ dimensionality reduction tools

on some kind of transformation domain. Nowadays, multiresolution analysis is often performed as a preprocessing step to dimensionality reduction. The most popular multiresolution analysis tool is the wavelet transform. It has enjoyed a wide-spread popularity in the field of face recognition. Over the past two decades, following the success of wavelet, a series of new multiresolution analysis tools like Ridgelet, Contourlet etc. were developed. Curvelet transform- developed by Candes and Donoho is a recent addition to this list. Compared to wavelet, Curvelet has improved directional elements and better ability to represent edges and other singularities along curves. And Curvelet transform yields a more sparse representation of the image than wavelet and Ridgelet transform. 3. Operational Overview The following Figure 1 represents the Architecture of Face Recognition System by Curvelet Transform.

Figure 1: Architecture of a Face Recognition System by Curvelet Transform

The modules that are involved in designing the architecture of this paper are,
Bit Quantization: This is used to quantize the 8-bit image into 4-bit and 2-bit images respectively. So

three versions of the image are obtained here.

Curvelet Transform: Curvelet transform is a multiresolution tool used to extract the feature from the

facial image. Three versions of the facial image are subjected to Curvelet Transform so that this multiresolution analysis captures the edge information of the image at 5 different resolutions. Thereby it generates 15 different versions to the original image. These are also referred to as Curvelet coefficients.
SVM: Support Vector Machine is a Classification tool used to classify the image. Thus feature sets

obtained using Curvelet transform are subjected to this tool will allow the image to be recognized as either identified or unidentified. In this project, multi-class SVM is used. 4. Conclusion and Future Work The technique used in this paper appears to be robust for frontal face recognition. It achieves better accuracy level of recognition in AT& T data base. The new image has to be tested with more set of trained images, and then the accuracy level will be good. The recognition accuracy for faces where there is an extreme variation in background or there is significant head tilt, the technique does not produce good results.

This project can be enhanced to capture live video images by inserting Web Cams. The recognition accuracy can be improved for these images by introducing some pre-processing steps like head tilt corrections and cropping for removing background variation. Bit quantization technique can be used to obtain the bolder edges of any image other than the human faces. This can be enhanced in the future.

References
[1] A. Majumdar and A. Bhattacharya- Face Recognition by Multiresolution Curvelet Transform on Bit Quantized Facial Images -International Conference on applications 2007. [2] http://www.face-rec.org/databases. [3] http://www.curvelet.org/papers. Computational Intelligence and Multimedia