Recognition of quantized still face images

Abstract

In applications such as document understanding, only binary face images may be available as inputs to a face recognition (FR) algorithm. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the number of grey levels on PCA, multiple exemplar discriminant analysis (MEDA) and the elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) FR algorithms. The inputs to these FR algorithms are quantized images (binary images or images with small number of grey levels) modified by distance and Box-Cox transforms. The performances of PCA and MEDA algorithms are at 87.66% for images in FRGC version 1 experiment 1 after they are thresholded and transformed while the EBGM algorithm achieves only 37.5%. In many document understanding applications, it is also required to verify a degraded low-quality image against a high-quality image, both of which are from the same source. For this problem, the performances of PCA and MEDA are stable when the images were degraded by noise, downsampling or different thresholding parameters.