Local binary pattern based face recognition with automatically detected fiducial points

Abstract

This paper deals with automatic face recognition in the context of a real application for person identification developed for the Czech News Agency (TK). We focus on popular Local Binary Patterns (LPBs) that are frequently used in this field with high recognition accuracy. One drawback of current LBP based methods is that the positions and number of the fiducial points are fixed. These points thus do not reflect the properties of a particular image whereas we believe it is beneficial to identify the most representative ones. The main contribution consists in proposing and comparing several LBP-based approaches that detect such points fully automatically. We use a set of Gabor filters for this task. Local extrema in the filter responses are detected and then used as the feature points. The number of points is further reduced by a clustering algorithm. Our approaches also differ from the other ones in the matching procedure. The proposed methods are evaluated on three standard corpora: ORL, FERET, AR face database and our TK dataset containing uncontrolled face images. Recognition results clearly show high quality of the proposed approaches that outperform significantly the baseline LBP approach on all corpora. The benefits of our methods are particularly evident in the case of real non-controlled images (TK corpus) where the accuracy is increased by more than 20% in absolute value.