Methodological improvement on local Gabor face recognition based on feature selection and enhanced Borda count

Face recognition has a wide range of possible applications in surveillance, human computer interfaces and marketing and advertising goods for selected customers according to age and gender. Because of the high classification rate and reduced computational time, one of the best methods for face recognition is based on Gabor jet feature extraction and Borda count classification. In this paper, we propose methodological improvements to increase face recognition rate by selection of Gabor jets using entropy and genetic algorithms. This selection of jets additionally allows faster processing for real-time face recognition. We also propose improvements in the Borda count classification through a weighted Borda count and a threshold to eliminate low score jets from the voting process to increase the face recognition rate. Combinations of Gabor jet selection and Borda count improvements are also proposed. We compare our results with those published in the literature to date and find significant improvements. Our best results on the FERET database are 99.8%, 99.5%, 89.2% and 86.8% recognition rates on the subsets Fb, Fc, Dup1 and Dup2, respectively. Compared to the best results published in the literature, the total number of recognition errors decreased from 163 to 112 (31%). We also tested the proposed method under illumination changes, occlusions with sunglasses and scarves and for small pose variations. Results on two different face databases (AR and Extended Yale B) with significant illumination changes showed over 90% recognition rate. The combination EJS–BTH–BIP reached 98% and 99% recognition rate in images with sunglasses and scarves from the AR database, respectively. The proposed method reached 93.5% recognition on faces with small pose variation of 25° rotation and 98.5% with 15% rotation in the FERET database.