Anil K. Jain and Unsang Park
April, 2009
Face Recognition systems have incorporated both global and local features. We propose to utilize micro features, namely facial marks (e.g., speckles, moles, and scars) to further improve face recognition and retrieval performance. Facial marks can be used in three ways: i) to supplement the matching results of an existing face matcher, ii) to enable a fast retrieval based on facial marks, and iii) to enable matching or retrieval from a partial or profile face image with marks. In order to automatically detect these marks, we first use Active Appearance Model (AAM) to locate and segment primary facial features (e.g., eyes, nose, and mouth). Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LoG) and morphological operators are used on the face region without primary facial features to detect facial marks. Experimental results based on 1,225 images (mugshots) of 671 subjects show that the use of facial marks improves the rank-1 identification accuracy of a state-of-the-art face recognition system from 91.88\% to 93.14\%.
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