Face recognition system using local autocorrelations and multiscale integration

In this paper we investigate the performance of a technique for face recognition based on the computation of 25 local autocorrelation coefficients. We use a large database of 11,600 frontal facial images of 116 persons, organized in training and test sets, for evaluation. Autocorrelation coefficients are computationally inexpensive, inherently shift-invariant and quite robust against changes in facial expression. We focus on the difficult problem of recognizing a large number of known human faces while rejecting other, unknown faces which lie quite close in pattern space. A multiresolution system achieves a recognition rate of 95%, while falsely accepting only 1.5% of unknown faces. It operates at a speed of about one face per second. Without rejection of unknown faces, we obtain a peak recognition rate of 99.9%. The good performance indicates that local autocorrelation coefficients have a surprisingly high information content