Unconstrained Face Recognition
Unconstrained Face Recognition
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Date
2004-08-17
Authors
Zhou, Shaohua
Advisor
Chellappa, Rama
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Abstract
Although face recognition has been actively studied over the past
decade, the state-of-the-art recognition systems yield
satisfactory performance only under controlled scenarios and
recognition accuracy degrades significantly when confronted with
unconstrained situations due to variations such as illumintion,
pose, etc. In this dissertation, we propose novel approaches that
are able to recognize human faces under unconstrained situations.
Part I presents algorithms for face recognition under
illumination/pose variations. For face recognition across
illuminations, we present a generalized photometric stereo
approach by modeling all face appearances belonging to all humans
under all lighting conditions. Using a linear generalization, we
achieve a factorization of the observation matrix consisting of
face appearances of different individuals, each under a different
illumination. We resolve ambiguities in factorization using
surface integrability and symmetry constraints. In addition, an
illumination-invariant identity descriptor is provided to perform
face recognition across illuminations. We further extend the
generalized photometric stereo approach to an illuminating light
field approach, which is able to recognize faces under pose and
illumination variations.
Face appearance lies in a high-dimensional nonlinear manifold. In
Part II, we introduce machine learning approaches based on
reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) to capture higher-order
statistical characteristics of the nonlinear appearance manifold.
In particular, we analyze principal components of the RKHS in a
probabilistic manner and compute distances such as the Chernoff
distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two Gaussian
densities in RKHS.
Part III is on face tracking and recognition from video. We first
present an enhanced tracking algorithm that models online
appearance changes in a video sequence using a mixture model and
produces good tracking results in various challenging scenarios.
For video-based face recognition, while conventional approaches
treat tracking and recognition separately, we present a
simultaneous tracking-and-recognition approach. This simultaneous
approach solved using the sequential importance sampling
algorithm improves accuracy in both tracking and recognition.
Finally, we propose a unifying framework called probabilistic
identity characterization able to perform face recognition under
registration/illumination/pose variation and from a still image,
a group of still images, or a video sequence.