Color component feature selection in feature-level fusion based color face recognition

In this paper, we propose a new color face recognition (FR) method which effectively employs feature selection algorithm in order to find the set of optimal color components (from various color models) for FR purpose. The proposed FR method is also designed to improve FR accuracy by combining the selected color components at the feature level. The effectiveness of the proposed color FR method has been successfully demonstrated using two public CMU-PIE and Color FERET face databases (DB). In our comparative experiments, traditional grayscale-based FR, previous color-based FR, and popular local binary pattern (LBP) based FR methods were compared with the proposed method. Experimental results show that our color FR method performs better than the aforementioned three different FR approaches. In particular, the proposed method can achieve 7.81% and 18.57% improvement in FR performance on the CMU-PIE and Color FERET DB, respectively, compared to representative color-based FR solutions previously developed.