Assessment of blurring and facial expression effects on facial image recognition

Abstract

In this paper we present methods for assessing the quality of facial images, degraded by blurring and facial expressions, for recognition. To assess the blurring effect, we measure the level of blurriness in the facial images by statistical analysis in the Fourier domain. Based on this analysis, a function is proposed to predict the performance of face recognition on blurred images. To assess facial images with expressions, we use Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to represent images that can be recognized with the Eigenface method, we refer to these images as "Good Quality", and images that cannot be recognized, we refer to these images as "Poor Quality". During testing, we classify a given image into one of the two classes. We use the FERET and Cohn-Kanade facial image databases to evaluate our algorithms for image quality assessment. The experimental results demonstrate that the prediction function for assessing the quality of blurred facial images is successful. In addition, our experiments show that our approach for assessing facial images with expressions is successful in predicting whether an image has a good quality or poor quality for recognition. Although the experiments in this paper are based on the Eigenface technique, the assessment methods can be extended to other face recognition algorithms. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.