A face recognition scheme based on spectral domain feature extraction

In this paper, a frequency domain feature extraction algorithm for face recognition is proposed, which efficiently exploits the local spatial variations in a face image. For the purpose of feature extraction, instead of considering the entire face image, an entropy-based local band selection criterion is developed, which selects high-informative horizontal segments from the face image. In order to capture the local variations within these high-informative horizontal bands precisely, a feature selection algorithm based on two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT) is proposed. Magnitudes and frequencies corresponding to the dominant 2D-DCT coefficients are selected as features and shown to provide high within-class compactness and high between-class separability. A principal component analysis is performed to further reduce the dimensionality of the feature space. Extensive experimentations have been carried out upon standard face databases and the recognition performance is compared with some of the existing face recognition schemes. It is found that the proposed method offers not only computational savings but also a very high degree of recognition accuracy.