Measuring differences between faces

This paper presents a novel approach for extracting characteristic parts of a face. Rather than finding a priori specified features such as nose, eyes, mouth or others, the proposed approach is aimed at extracting from a face the most distinguishing or dissimilar parts with respect to another given face, i.e. at “finding differences” between faces. This is accomplished by feeding a binary classifier by a set of image patches, randomly sampled from the two face images, and scoring the patches (or features) by their mutual distances. In order to deal with the multi-scale nature of natural facial features, a local space-variant sampling has been adopted.