Fixed FAR vote fusion of regional facial classifiers

Holistic face recognition methods like PCA and LDA have the disadvantage that they are very sensitive to expression, hair and illumination variations. This is one of the main reasons they are no longer competitive in the major benchmarks like FRGC and FRVT. In this paper we present an LDA based approach that combines many overlapping regional classifiers (experts) using what we call a Fixed FAR Voting Fusion (FFVF) strategy. The combination by voting of regional classifiers means that if there are sufficient regional classifiers unaffected by the expression, illumination or hair variations, the fused classifier will still correctly recognise the face. The FFVF approach has two interesting properties: it allows robust fusion of dependent classifiers and it only requires a single parameter to be tuned to obtain weights for fusion of different classifiers. We show the potential of the FFVF of regional classifiers using the standard benchmarks experiments 1 and 4 on FRGCv2 data. The multi-region FFVF classifier has a FRR of 4% at FAR=0.1% for controlled and 38% for uncontrolled data compared to 7% and 56% for the best single region classifier.