Face Recognition Using Foveal Vision

  • Authors:
  • Silviu Minut;Sridhar Mahadevan;John M. Henderson;Fred C. Dyer

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • BMVC '00 Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Biologically Motivated Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Data from human subjects recorded by an eyetracker while they are learning new faces shows a high degree of similarity in saccadic eye movements over a face. Such experiments suggest face recognition can be modeled as a sequential process, with each fixation providing observations using both foveal and parafoveal information. We describe a sequential model of face recognition that is incremental and scalable to large face images. Two approaches to implementing an artificial fovea are described, which transform a constant resolution image into a variable resolution image with acute resolution in the fovea, and an exponential decrease in resolution towards the periphery. For each individual in a database of faces, a hidden-Markov model (HMM) classifier is learned, where the observation sequences necessary to learn the HMMs are generated by fixating on different regions of a face. Detailed experimental results are provided which show the two foveal HMM classifiers outperform a more traditional HMM classifier built by moving a horizontal window from top to bottom on a highly subsampled face image.