Is block matching an alternative tool to LBP for face recognition?

In this paper, we introduce the Block Matching (BM) as an alternative patch-based local matching approach for solving the face recognition problem. The Block Matching enables an image patch of the probe face image to search for its best matching from displaced positions in the gallery face image. This matching strategy is very effective for handling spatial shift between two images and it is radically different from that of the widely used LBP type patch-based local matching approaches. Our evaluations on the FERET and CMU-PIE databases show that the performance of this simple method is well comparable (superior) to that of the popular LBP approach. We argue that the Block Matching could provide face recognition a new approach with more flexible algorithm architecture. One can expect that it could lead to much higher performance when combining with other feature extraction techniques, like Gabor wavelet and deep learning.