Search Results (3)

In recent years, palmprint recognition has gained increased interest and has been a focus of significant research as a trustworthy personal identification method. The performance of any palmprint recognition system mainly depends on the effectiveness of the utilized feature extraction approach. In this paper, we propose a three-step approach to address the challenging problem of contactless palmprint recognition: (1) a pre-processing, based on median filtering and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), is used to remove potential noise and equalize the images’ lighting; (2) a multiresolution analysis is applied to extract binarized statistical image features (BSIF) at several discrete wavelet transform (DWT) resolutions; (3) a classification stage is performed to categorize the extracted features into the corresponding class using a K-nearest neighbors (K-NN)-based classifier. The feature extraction strategy is the main contribution of this work; we used the multiresolution analysis to extract the pertinent information from several image resolutions as an alternative to the classical method based on multi-patch decomposition. The proposed approach was thoroughly assessed using two contactless palmprint databases: the Indian Institute of Technology—Delhi (IITD) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automatisation (CASIA). The results are impressive compared to the current state-of-the-art methods: the Rank-1 recognition rates are 98.77% and 98.10% for the IITD and CASIA databases, respectively. Full article

Single-Sample Face Recognition (SSFR) is a computer vision challenge. In this scenario, there is only one example from each individual on which to train the system, making it difficult to identify persons in unconstrained environments, mainly when dealing with changes in facial expression, posture, lighting, and occlusion. This paper discusses the relevance of an original method for SSFR, called Multi-Block Color-Binarized Statistical Image Features (MB-C-BSIF), which exploits several kinds of features, namely, local, regional, global, and textured-color characteristics. First, the MB-C-BSIF method decomposes a facial image into three channels (e.g., red, green, and blue), then it divides each channel into equal non-overlapping blocks to select the local facial characteristics that are consequently employed in the classification phase. Finally, the identity is determined by calculating the similarities among the characteristic vectors adopting a distance measurement of the K-nearest neighbors (K-NN) classifier. Extensive experiments on several subsets of the unconstrained Alex and Robert (AR) and Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) databases show that the MB-C-BSIF achieves superior and competitive results in unconstrained situations when compared to current state-of-the-art methods, especially when dealing with changes in facial expression, lighting, and occlusion. The average classification accuracies are 96.17% and 99% for the AR database with two specific protocols (i.e., Protocols I and II, respectively), and 38.01% for the challenging LFW database. These performances are clearly superior to those obtained by state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the proposed method uses algorithms based only on simple and elementary image processing operations that do not imply higher computational costs as in holistic, sparse or deep learning methods, making it ideal for real-time identification. Full article

Face recognition is one of the most active research fields of computer vision and pattern recognition, with many practical and commercial applications including identification, access control, forensics, and human-computer interactions. However, identifying a face in a crowd raises serious questions about individual freedoms and poses ethical issues. Significant methods, algorithms, approaches, and databases have been proposed over recent years to study constrained and unconstrained face recognition. 2D approaches reached some degree of maturity and reported very high rates of recognition. This performance is achieved in controlled environments where the acquisition parameters are controlled, such as lighting, angle of view, and distance between the camera–subject. However, if the ambient conditions (e.g., lighting) or the facial appearance (e.g., pose or facial expression) change, this performance will degrade dramatically. 3D approaches were proposed as an alternative solution to the problems mentioned above. The advantage of 3D data lies in its invariance to pose and lighting conditions, which has enhanced recognition systems efficiency. 3D data, however, is somewhat sensitive to changes in facial expressions. This review presents the history of face recognition technology, the current state-of-the-art methodologies, and future directions. We specifically concentrate on the most recent databases, 2D and 3D face recognition methods. Besides, we pay particular attention to deep learning approach as it presents the actuality in this field. Open issues are examined and potential directions for research in facial recognition are proposed in order to provide the reader with a point of reference for topics that deserve consideration. Full article