Automated facial feature detection and face recognition using Gabor features on range and portrait images

In this paper, we present a novel identity verification system based on Gabor features extracted from range (3D) representations of faces. Multiple landmarks (fiducials) on a face are automatically detected using these Gabor features. Once the landmarks are identified, the Gabor features on all fiducials of a face are concatenated to form a feature vector for that particular face. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is used to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vector while maximizing the discrimination power. These novel features were tested on 1196 range images. The same features were also extracted from portrait images, and the accuracies of both modalities were compared. A superior verification accuracy was obtained using the range data, and a highly competitive accuracy to that of other techniques in the literature was also obtained for the portrait data.