Local-DCT features for facial recognition

This paper presents the results of a project investigating the use of discrete-cosine transform (DCT) to represent facial images of an identity recognition system. The objective was to address the problem of sensitivity to variation in illumination, faced by commercially available systems. The proposed method uses local, block-wise DCT to extract the features of the image. Results show that this appearance based method gives high identification rates, improved tolerance to variation in illumination, and simple implementation.