Performance Evaluation of Some Selected Classification Algorithms in a Facial Recognition System

Facial Recognition (FR) has been an active area of research and has diverse applicable environment, it continues to be a challenging research topic. With the development of image processing and pattern recognition technology, there are many challenges in machine learning to select the appropriate classification algorithms, most especially in the area of classification of extracted features to have low classification time, high sensitivity and accuracy of the classification algorithms, so it is very important to explore the performance of different algorithms in image classification. The three selected supervised learning classification algorithms: Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ), Relevance Vector Machine (RVM), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) performance were evaluated so as to know the most effective out of the selected algorithms for facial images classification. The development of the system has four stages, the first stage is image acquisition and 180 images were taken by digital camera under same illumination and light colour background. The second stage is pre-processing to improve the images data by suppressing unwilling distortion; grayscale and normalization were used for image pre-processing. The third stage is feature extraction; Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is adopted for this purpose. While the fourth stage is face recognition classification, Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) was used to test the performance of each the three algorithms. However the Learning Vector Quantization algorithm, Relevance Vector Machine and Support Vector Machine performance have not been compared together to the most effective out of the three algorithms in term of False Positive Rate, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, Accuracy and Computation Time. Hence, this work evaluated the performance of the Learning Vector Quantization; Relevance Vector Machine and Support Vector Machine classification algorithms in facial recognition system and Support Vector Machine outwit the other two algorithms in facial recognition in term of specificity, recognition time and recognition accuracy at different threshold.