Relaxed local ternary pattern for face recognition

Local binary pattern (LBP) is sensitive to noise. Local ternary pattern (LTP) partially solves this problem by encoding the small pixel difference into a third state. The small pixel difference may be easily overwhelmed by noise. Thus, it is difficult to precisely determine its sign and magnitude. In this paper, we propose the concept of uncertain state to encode the small pixel difference. We do not care its sign and magnitude, and encode it as both 0 and 1 with equal probability. The proposed Relaxed LTP is tested on the CMU-PIE database, the extended Yale B database and the O2FN mobile face database. Superior performance is demonstrated compared with LBP and LTP.