A case for the average-half-face in 2D and 3D for face recognition

Abstract

We observe that the human face is inherently symmetric and we would like to exploit this symmetry in face recognition. The average-half-face has been previously shown to do just that for a set of 3D faces when using eigenfaces for recognition. We build upon that work and present a comparison of the use of the average-half-face to the use of the original full face with 6 different algorithms applied to two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) databases. The average-half-face is constructed from the full frontal face image in two steps; first the face image is centered and divided in half and then the two halves are averaged together (reversing the columns of one of the halves). The resulting average-half-face is then used as the input for face recognition algorithms. Previous work has shown that the accuracy of 3D face recognition using eigenfaces with the average-half-face is significantly better than using the full face. We compare the results using the average-half-face and the full face using six face recognition methods; eigenfaces, multi-linear principal components analysis (MPCA), MPCA with linear discriminant analysis (MPCALDA), Fisherfaces (LDA), independent component analysis (ICA), and support vector machines (SVM). We utilize two well-known 2D face database as well as a 3D face database for the comparison. Our results show that in most cases it is superior to employ the average-half-face for frontal face recognition. The consequences of this discovery may result in substantial savings in storage and computation time.