Weak orthogonalization of face and perturbation for recognition

This paper describes a new method for face recognition under drastic changes of the imaging processes through which the facial images are acquired. Unlike the conventional methods that use only the face features, the present method exploits the statistical information of the variations between the face image sets being compared, in addition to the features of the faces themselves. To incorporate both of the face and perturbation features for recognition, we develop a technique called weak orthogonalization. Of the two subspaces that transforms the given two overlapped subspaces so that the volume of the intersection of the resulting two subspaces is minimized. Matching operations are performed in the transformed face space that has thus been weakly orthogonalized against perturbation space. Experimental results on real pictures of the frontal faces from drivers´ licenses show that the new algorithm improves the recognition performance over the conventional methods. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on image sets with changes in viewing geometry