Symmetric Face Normalization

Abstract

Image registration is an important process in image processing which is used to improve the performance of computer vision related tasks. In this paper, a novel self-registration method, namely symmetric face normalization (SFN) algorithm, is proposed. There are three contributions in this paper. Firstly, a self-normalization algorithm for face images is proposed, which normalizes a face image to be reflection symmetric horizontally. It has the advantage that no face model needs to be built, which is always severely time-consuming. Moreover, it can be considered as a pre-processing procedure which greatly decreases the parameters needed to be adjusted. Secondly, an iterative algorithm is designed to solve the self-normalization algorithm. Finally, SFN is applied to the between-image alignment problem, which results in the symmetric face alignment (SFA) algorithm. Experiments performed on face databases show that the accuracy of SFN is higher than 0.95 when the translation on the x-axis is lower than 15 pixels, or the rotation angle is lower than 18°. Moreover, the proposed SFA outperforms the state-of-the-art between-image alignment algorithm in efficiency (about four times) without loss of accuracy.