Biometrics based on facial landmark with application in person identification

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technique for face recognition based on facial landmarks extracted automatically. Our landmarks are those associated with eyes mouth and nose. To extract facial landmarks, we first use Haar cascade algorithm to detect the face ROI following by Haar cascade algorithm for the eye, mouth and nose ROI determination. To find landmark associated with the eye, we convert eye ROI image to binary image using thresholding algorithm. To exclude the eyebrow region, we apply horizontal radon transform. The project data will then be used to separate the eyebrow region from the eye region. To detect eye-related landmark, vertical radon transform is applied. With the vertical projection data, the outermost pixel can be identified and the associated eye landmark can be determined. The similar technique can then be used to identify landmarks associated with the nose and mouth area. Given the correspond landmarks on the reference face and the query face, geometric transformation can be determined using normal equation bases on minimized mean squared error. The two faces are then aligned. To provide the quantitative measurement, the two aligned face are converted to edge image using canny edge algorithm. The distance map error between the two aligned edge facial images is then used to identify the query face. The purposed algorithm for person identification was tested on the face database resulting in a very high accuracy.