Expressing Facial Structure and Appearance Information in Frequency Domain for Face Recognition

Beneath the uncertain primitive visual features of face images are the primitive intrinsic structural patterns (PISP) essential for characterizing a sample face discriminative attributes. It is on this basis that this paper presents a simple yet effective facial descriptor formed from derivatives of Gaussian and Gabor Wavelets. The new descriptor is coined local edge gradient Gabor magnitude (LEGGM) pattern. LEGGM first uncovers the PISP locked in every pixel through determining the pixel gradient in relation to its neighbors using the Derivatives of Gaussians. Then, the resulting output is embedded into the global appearance of the face which are further processed using Gabor wavelets in order to express its frequency characteristics. Additionally, we adopted various subspace models for dimensionality reduction in order to ascertain the best fit model for reporting a more effective representation of the LEGGM patterns. The proposed descriptor-based face recognition method is evaluated on three databases: Plastic surgery, LFW, and GT face databases. Through experiments, using a base classifier, the efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated, especially in the case of plastic surgery database. The heterogeneous database, which we created to typify real-world scenario, show that the proposed method is to an extent insensitive to image formation factors with impressive recognition performances.