RESEARCH ARTICLE


Face Verification Using Modeled Eigenspectrum



Bappaditya Manda, Xudong Jiang *, Alex Kot
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore


© 2017 Jiang et al.;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798; Tel: +65 6790 5018; Fax: +65 6793 3318; E-mail: exdjiang@ntu.edu.sg


Abstract

Face verification is different from face identification task. Some traditional subspace methods that work well in face identification may suffer from severe over-fitting problem when applied for the verification task. Conventional discriminative methods such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and its variants are highly sensitive to the training data, which hinders them from achieving high verification accuracy. This work proposes an eigenspectrum model that alleviates the over-fitting problems by replacing the unreliable small and zero eigenvalues with the model values. It also enables the discriminant evaluation in the whole space to extract the low dimensional features effectively. The proposed approach is evaluated and compared with 8 popular subspace based methods for a face verification task. Experimental results on three face databases show that the proposed method consistently outperforms others.

Keywords: Biometrics, face verification, subspace methods, feature extraction, discriminant analysis.