Face Verification using External Features

Human face features can be divided in two sets: internal features (composed by eyes, nose and mouth) and external features (located at head, chin, and ears). In general face classification problems, only the internal information is commonly used since this is more difficult to imitate. Nevertheless, nowadays a lot of face verification applications not related to security are developed, and in these cases the contribution of external features for classification purposes should be revised. In this paper, we propose a complete scheme based on a top-down reconstruction algorithm to extract external features of face images. Face verification experiments are performed to test our system and the obtained results show that the information contributed by the external features is specially significant and useful for verification purposes when faces are partially occluded