A Novel Approach for Face Recognition under Varying Illumination Conditions

Abstract

Face recognition systems are in great demand for domestic and commercial applications. A novel feature extraction approach is proposed based on TanTrigg Lower Edge Directional Patterns for robust face recognition. Histogram of Orientated Gradients is used to detect faces and the facial landmarks are localized using Ensemble of Regression Trees. The detected face is rotated based on facial landmarks using affine transformation followed by cropping and resizing. TanTrigg preprocessor is used to convert the aligned face region into an illumination invariant region for better feature extraction. Eight directional Kirsch compass masks are convolved with the preprocessed face image. Feature descriptor is extracted by dividing the TTLEDP image into several sub-regions and concatenating the histograms of all the sub-regions. Chi-square distance metric is used to match faces from the trained feature space. The experimental results prove that the proposed TTLEDP feature descriptor has better recognition rate than existing methods, overcoming the challenges like varying illumination and noise