AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GABOR REPRESENTATIONS FOR FACE RECOGNITION

Abstract

This paper examines the classification capability of different Gabor representations for human face recognition. Usually, Gabor filter responses for eight orientations and five scales for each orientation are calculated and all 40 basic feature vectors are concatenated to assemble the Gabor feature vector. This work explores 70 different Gabor feature vector extraction techniques for face recognition. The main goal is to determine the characteristics of the 40 basic Gabor feature vectors and to devise a faster Gabor feature extraction method. Among all the 40 basic Gabor feature representations the filter responses acquired from the largest scale at smallest relative orientation change (with respect to face) shows the highest discriminating ability for face recognition while classification is performed using three classification methods: probabilistic neural networks (PNN), support vector machines (SVM) and decision trees (DT). A 40 times faster summation based Gabor representation shows about 98% recognition rate while classification is performed using SVM. In this representation all 40 basic Gabor feature vectors are summed to form the summation based Gabor feature vector. In the experiment, a sixth order data tensor containing the basic Gabor feature vectors is constructed, for all the operations.