Publication Date

2004

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Dr. Rob Byrd (Director), Dr. Robert Crawford, Dr. James Gary

Degree Program

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Degree Type

Master of Science

Abstract

Face recognition is a complex and difficult process due to various factors such as variability of illumination, occlusion, face specific characteristics like hair, glasses, beard, etc., and other similar problems affecting computer vision problems. Using a system that offers robust and consistent results for face recognition, various applications such as identification for law enforcement, secure system access, computer human interaction, etc., can be automated successfully. Different methods exist to solve the face recognition problem. Principal component analysis, Independent component analysis, and linear discriminant analysis are few other statistical techniques that are commonly used in solving the face recognition problem. Genetic algorithm, elastic bunch graph matching, artificial neural network, etc. are few of the techniques that have been proposed and implemented.

The objective of this thesis paper is to provide insight into different methods available for face recognition, and explore methods that provided an efficient and feasible solution. Factors affecting the result of face recognition and the preprocessing steps that eliminate such abnormalities are also discussed briefly. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is the most efficient and reliable method known for at least past eight years. Elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) technique is one of the promising techniques that we studied in this thesis work. We also found better results with EBGM method than PCA in the current thesis paper. We recommend use of a hybrid technique involving the EBGM algorithm to obtain better results. Though, the EBGM method took a long time to train and generate distance measures for the given gallery images compared to PCA. But, we obtained better cumulative match score (CMS) results for the EBGM in comparison to the PCA method. Other promising techniques that can be explored separately in other paper include Genetic algorithm based methods, Mixture of principal components, and Gabor wavelet techniques.

Disciplines

Computer Sciences | Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces

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