Chathunika Gamage

Supervisor: Dr. Lasantha Seneviratne

Abstract : Face recognition under varying illumination and dimensionality reduction has been a key problem in the field of

Computer Vision. An extension of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) called Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is an
unsupervised learning algorithm. ICA has been utilized in this project as a feature extraction technique apart from aiding
dimensionality reduction. In the proposed approach three feature selection techniques have been investigated namely Adaboost,
Gentle Adaboost and Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS). The classifier used is the supervised learning algorithm, Support
Vector Machines (SVM). The algorithm was tested on the Extended Yale B face database and a five person database created for the
purpose of this research. Face recognition accuracy was seen to be highest with all extracted features, Adaboost and Gentle
Adaboost selected features used in the classification and lowest with SFFS. The performance of the algorithm is enhanced when
using the Adaboost or Gentle Adaboost selected features as there is an increase of accuracy and dimensional reduction.

THE FACE CHALLENGE

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

The variations of the face due to varying lighting

conditions far out weigh the variations of the face
due to its identity. This results in the performance
of the face recognition system to degrade posing
a challenging problem for robust face recognition.

APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY

It was seen that the average

number of components was
23% of the 180 features in
total
when
using
Adaboost/Gentle-Adaboost or
SFFS, increasing dimensional
reduction.
The
highest
accuracy was seen when using
all features, Adaboost and
Gentle Adaboost features.

Training Face Dataset

Feature
Subspace

Feature
Selection of
test image ICs

Feature
Selection of
training
image ICs

One-Against
All Multiclass
Classification
using SVM
Training Set

Improving face recognition accuracy and dimensional

reduction are some of the key aspects this
methodology encompasses.
A combination of Machine Learning algorithms are
used in the development. PCA and sphering of the
data are carried out prior to feature extraction as preprocessing steps.
Feature selection techniques optimises the ICs
extracted. The SVM classifier utilises a quadratic
Kernel function to map training data to Kernel space.
A Graphical user interface with event-driven
architecture was developed to be able to test the
algorithm effectively, also in real-time.

89
88
87
86
85
84
83
82
81
80
All Components

0.8

0.8

0.4
0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Adaboost

Gentle Adaboost
Gentle Adaboost

SFFS
SFFS

ROC curve of Adaboost/Gentle Features (AUC = 0.91567 )

1

0.6

Adaboost

All Components

Face
Recognised as
a Class in
Database or
not

90

True Positive Rate

Feature
Extraction
using ICA

True Positive Rate

ROC curve of All features (AUC = 0.74752 )

Average Accuracy

0.6
0.4
0.2

False Positive Rate

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

False Positive Rate

CONCLUTION & FURTHER WORK

When the algorithm utilises the feature selection technique
Adaboost or Gentle-Adaboost there is dimensional reduction as
well as high accuracy of 89% illustrating that the predictive
power has been optimised.
However when images were taken real-time the performance of
the system degraded. When the guided filter was used on the
real-time test images, accuracy improved slightly with the
denoising effect of this the edge-preserving filter.
Overall the face recognition accuracy of frontal face images
under varying illumination was reasonably high to a great
extent. One of the further work is to increase the training
dataset with images taken in one full day rather than only during
day-time.

BEng (Hons) in Electronic Engineering, November 2014