Unfolding a face: from singular to manifold

  • Authors:
  • Ognjen Arandjelović

  • Affiliations:
  • Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • ACCV'09 Proceedings of the 9th Asian conference on Computer Vision - Volume Part III
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Face recognition from a single image remains an important task in many practical applications and a significant research challenge Some of the challenges are inherent to the problem, for example due to changing lighting conditions Others, no less significant, are of a practical nature – face recognition algorithms cannot be assumed to operate on perfect data, but rather often on data that has already been subject to pre-processing errors (e.g localization and registration errors) This paper introduces a novel method for face recognition that is both trained and queried using only a single image per subject The key concept, motivated by abundant prior work on face appearance manifolds, is that of face part manifolds – it is shown that the appearance seen through a sliding window overlaid over an image of a face, traces a trajectory over a 2D manifold embedded in the image space We present a theoretical argument for the use of this representation and demonstrate how it can be effectively exploited in the single image based recognition It is shown that while inheriting the advantages of local feature methods, it also implicitly captures the geometric relationship between discriminative facial features and is naturally robust to face localization errors Our theoretical arguments are verified in an experimental evaluation on the Yale Face Database.