The contribution of external features to face recognition

Abstract

In this paper we propose a face recognition algorithm that combines internal and external information of face images. Most of the previous works dealing with face recognition use only internal face features to classify, not considering the information located at head, chin and ears. Here we propose an adaptation of a top-down segmentation algorithm to extract external features from face images, and then we combine this information with internal features using a modification of the non parametric discriminant analysis technique. In the experimental results we show that the contribution of external features to face classification problems is clearly relevant, specially in presence of occlusions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.