Occluded face recognition by means of the IFS

Abstract

Due to growing demands in such application areas as law enforcement, video surveillance, banking, and security system access authentication, automatic face recognition has attracted great attention in recent years. The advantages of facial identification over alternative methods, such as fingerprint identification, are based primarily on the fact that face is fairly easy to use and well accepted by people. However it is not robust enough to be used in most practical security applications because too sensitive to variations in pose and illumination. During the last few years, many algorithms have been proposed to overcome these problems using 2-D images, but very few has been made in order to address the problem of partial occlusions. In this paper, a fractal based technique is presented; the face image is partitioned in different regions of interest, each one is indexed by means of an IPS system. A new distance function is then introduced, in order to discard unuseful information. The proposed method turns out to be faster and more robust than other approaches in the state of the art. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.