Modelling Distance Functions Induced by Face Recognition Algorithms

• Main Author: Chaudhari, Soumee
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2004
• Subjects: affine space; eigen space; principal component analysis; optimal affine transformation; biometrics; American Studies; Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/990; https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1989&context=etd

Face recognition algorithms has in the past few years become a very active area of research in the fields of computer vision, image processing, and cognitive psychology. This has spawned various algorithms of different complexities. The concept of principal component analysis(PCA) is a popular mode of face recognition algorithm and has often been used to benchmark other face recognition algorithms for identification and verification scenarios. However in this thesis, we try to analyze different face recognition algorithms at a deeper level. The objective is to model the distances output by any face recognition algorithm as a function of the input images. We achieve this by creating an affine eigen space from the PCA space such that it can approximate the results of the face recognition algorithm under consideration as closely as possible. Holistic template matching algorithms like the Linear Discriminant Analysis algorithm( LDA), the Bayesian Intrapersonal/Extrapersonal classifier(BIC), as well as local feature based algorithms like the Elastic Bunch Graph Matching algorithm(EBGM) and a commercial face recognition algorithm are selected for our experiments. We experiment on two different data sets, the FERET data set and the Notre Dame data set. The FERET data set consists of images of subjects with variation in both time and expression. The Notre Dame data set consists of images of subjects with variation in time. We train our affine approximation algorithm on 25 subjects and test with 300 subjects from the FERET data set and 415 subjects from the Notre Dame data set. We also analyze the effect of different distance metrics used by the face recognition algorithm on the accuracy of the approximation. We study the quality of the approximation in the context of recognition for the identification and verification scenarios, characterized by cumulative match score curves (CMC) and receiver operator curves (ROC), respectively. Our studies indicate that both the holistic template matching algorithms as well as feature based algorithms can be well approximated. We also find the affine approximation training can be generalized across covariates. For the data with time variation, we find that the rank order of approximation performance is BIC, LDA, EBGM, and commercial. For the data with expression variation, the rank order is LDA, BIC, commercial, and EBGM. Experiments to approximate PCA with distance measures other than Euclidean also performed very well. PCA+Euclidean distance is best approximated followed by PCA+MahL1, PCA+MahCosine, and PCA+Covariance.