Person-specific face representation for recognition

Most face recognition methods rely on a common feature space to represent the faces, in which the face aspects that better distinguish among all the persons are emphasized. This strategy may be inadequate to represent more appropriate aspects of a specific person's face, since there may be some aspects that are good at distinguishing only a given person from the others. Based on this idea and supported by some findings in the human perception of faces, we propose a face recognition framework that associates a feature space to each person that we intend to recognize. Such feature spaces are conceived to underline the discriminating face aspects of the persons they represent. In order to recognize a probe, we match it to the gallery in all the feature spaces and fuse the results to establish the identity. With the help of an algorithm that we devise, the Discriminant Patch Selection, we were capable of carrying out experiments to intuitively compare the traditional approaches with the person-specific representation. In the performed experiments, the person-specific face representation always resulted in a better identification of the faces.