Recent Advances in Face Recognition

Kresimir Delac wrote:Face recognition is still a vividly researched area in computer science. First attempts were made in early 1970-ies, but a real boom happened around 1988, parallel with a large increase in computational power. The first widely accepted algorithm of that time was the PCA or eigenfaces method, which even today is used not only as a benchmark method to compare new methods to, but as a base for many methods derived from the original idea.

Today, more than 20 years after, many scientists agree that the simple two frontal images in controlled conditions comparison is practically a solved problem. With minimal variation in such images apart from facial expression, the problem becomes trivial by today’s standards with the recognition accuracy above 90% reported across many papers. This is arguably even better than human performance in the same conditions (especially if the humans are tested on the images of the unknown persons). However, when variations in images caused by pose, aging or extreme illumination conditions are introduced, humans’ ability to recognize faces is still remarkable compared to computers’, and we can safely say that the computers are currently not even close.

The main idea and the driver of further research in this area are security applications and human-computer interaction. Face recognition represents an intuitive and nonintrusive method of recognizing people and this is why it became one of three identification methods used in e-passports and a biometric of choice for many other security applications. However, until the above mentioned problems (illumination, pose, aging) are solved, it is unrealistic to expect that the full deployment potential of face recognition systems will be realized. There are many technological issues to be solved as well, some of which have been addressed in recent ANSI and ISO standards.

This goal of this book is to provide the reader with the most up to date research performed in automatic face recognition. The chapters presented here use innovative approaches to deal with a wide variety of unsolved issues.