Modified SIFT Descriptors for Face Recognition under Different Emotions

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to develop a fully automatic face recognition algorithm. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) has sparingly been used in face recognition. In this paper, a Modified SIFT (MSIFT) approach has been proposed to enhance the recognition performance of SIFT. In this paper, the work is done in three steps. First, the smoothing of the image has been done using DWT. Second, the computational complexity of SIFT in descriptor calculation is reduced by subtracting average from each descriptor instead of normalization. Third, the algorithm is made automatic by using Coefficient of Correlation (CoC) instead of using the distance ratio (which requires user interaction). The main achievement of this method is reduced database size, as it requires only neutral images to store instead of all the expressions of the same face image. The experiments are performed on the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) database, which indicates that the proposed approach achieves better performance than SIFT based methods. In addition, it shows robustness against various facial expressions.