Handbook of Face Recognition

Ralph, Gross, Simon Baker, Iain Matthews, and Takeo Kanade
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. rgross@cs.emu.edu, simonb@cs.emu.edu, tk@cs.emu.edu
The last decade has seen automatic face recognition evolve from small-scale research systems to a wide range of commercial products. Driven by the FERET face database and evaluation protocol, the currently best commercial systems achieve verification accuracies comparable to those of fingerprint recognizers. In these experiments, only frontal face images taken under controlled lighting conditions were used. As the use of face recognition systems expands toward less restricted environments, the development of algorithms for view and illumination invariant face recognition becomes important. However, the performance of current algorithms degrades significantly when tested across pose and illumination, as documented in a number of evaluations. In this chapter we review previously proposed algorithms for pose and illumination invariant face recognition. We then describe in detail two successful appearance-based algorithms for face recognition across pose, eigen light-fields, and Bayesian face subregions. We furthermore show how both of these algorithms can be extended toward face recognition across pose and illumination.
The most recent evaluation of commercial face recognition systems shows the level of performance for face verification of the best systems to be on par with fingerprint recognizers for frontal, uniformly illuminated faces [38]. Recognizing faces reliably across changes in pose and illumination has proved to be a much more difficult problem [9, 24, 38]. Although most research has so far focused on frontal face recognition, there is a sizable body...