Robust matching by dynamic space warping for accurate face recognition

The utility of face recognition for multimedia indexing is enhanced by using accurate detection and alignment of salient invariant face features. The face recognition can be performed using template matching or a feature-based approach, but both these methods suffer from occlusion and require an a priori model for extracting information. To avoid these drawbacks, we present a complete scheme for face recognition based on salient feature extraction in challenging conditions, which is performed without an a priori or learned model. These features are used in a matching process that overcomes occlusion effects using the dynamic space warping which aligns each feature in the query image, if possible, with its corresponding feature in the gallery set. Thus, we make face recognition robust to low frequency variations (like the presence of occlusion, etc) as well as to high frequency variations (like expression, gender, etc). A maximum likelihood scheme is used to make the recognition process more precise, as is shown in the experiments