Face recognition is a rapidly growing research area due to increasing demands for security in commercial and law enforcement applications. This paper provides an up-to-date review of research efforts in face recognition techniques based on two-dimensional (2D) images in the visual and infrared (IR) spectra. Face recognition systems based on visual images have reached a significant level of maturity with some practical success. However, the performance of visual face recognition may degrade under poor illumination conditions or for subjects of various skin colors. IR imagery represents a viable alternative to visible imaging in the search for a robust and practical identification system. While visual face recognition systems perform relatively reliably under controlled illumination conditions, thermal IR face recognition systems are advantageous when there is no control over illumination or for detecting disguised faces. Face recognition using 3D images is another active area of face recognition, which provides robust face recognition with changes in pose. Recent research has also demonstrated that the fusion of different imaging modalities and spectral components can improve the overall performance of face recognition.

We present a new way of extending independent components analysis (ICA) to overcomplete representations. In contrast to the causal generative extensions of ICA which maintain marginal independence of sources, we define features as deterministic (linear) functions of the inputs. This assumption results in marginal dependencies among the features, but conditional independence of the features given the inputs. By assigning energies to the features a probability distribution over the input states is defined through the Boltzmann distribution. Free parameters of this model are trained using the contrastive divergence objective (Hinton, 2002). When the number of features is equal to the number of input dimensions this energy-based model reduces to noiseless ICA and we show experimentally that the proposed learning algorithm is able to perform blind source separation on speech data. In additional experiments we train overcomplete energy-based models to extract features from various standard data-sets containing speech, natural images, hand-written digits and faces.

We present in this paper an Independent Gabor Features (IGF) method and its application to face recognition. The novelty of the IGF method comes from (i) the derivation of independent Gabor features in the feature extraction stage, and (ii) the development of an IGF features-based Probabilistic Reasoning Model (PRM) classification method in the pattern recognition stage. In particular, the IGF method first derives a Gabor feature vector from a set of downsampled Gabor wavelet representations of face images, then reduces the dimensionality of the vector by means of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and finally defines the independent Gabor features based on the Independent Component Analysis (ICA). The independence property of these Gabor features facilitates the application of the PRM method for classification. The rationale behind integrating the Gabor wavelets and the ICA is two-fold. On the one hand, the Gabor transformed face images exhibit strong characteristics of spatial locality, scale and orientation selectivity. These images can thus produce salient local features that are most suitable for face recognition. On the other hand, ICA would further reduce redundancy and represent independent features explicitly. These independent features are most useful for subsequent pattern discrimination and associative recall. Experiments on face recognition using the FERET and the Chengjun Liu is with the Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102. E-mail: liu@cs.njit.edu.

Independent Components Analysis (ICA) maximizes the statistical independence of the representational components of a training image ensemble, but it cannot distinguish between the different factors, or modes, inherent to image formation, including scene structure, illumination, and imaging. We introduce a nonlinear, multifactor model that generalizes ICA. Our Multilinear ICA (MICA) model of image ensembles learns the statistically independent components of multiple factors. Whereas ICA employs linear (matrix) algebra, MICA exploits multilinear (tensor) algebra. We furthermore introduce a multilinear projection algorithm which projects an unlabeled test image into the N constituent mode spaces to simultaneously infer its mode labels. In the context of facial image ensembles, where the mode labels are person, viewpoint, illumination, expression, etc., we demonstrate that the statistical regularities learned by MICA capture information that, in conjunction with our multilinear projection algorithm, improves automatic face recognition. 1

The performance of face recognition methods using subspace projection is directly related to the characteristics of their basis images, especially in the cases of local distortion or partial occlusion. In order for a subspace projection method to be robust to local distortion and partial occlusion, the basis images generated by the method should exhibit a part-based local representation. We propose an effective part-based local representation method named locally salient ICA (LS-ICA) method for face recognition that is robust to local distortion and partial occlusion. The LS-ICA method only employs locally salient information from important facial parts in order to maximize the benefit of applying the idea of “recognition by parts. ” It creates part-based local basis images by imposing additional localization constraint in the process of computing ICA architecture I basis images. We have contrasted the LS-ICA method with other part-based representations such as LNMF (Localized Non-negative Matrix Factorization) and LFA (Local Feature Analysis). Experimental results show that the LS-ICA method performs better than PCA, ICA architecture, ICA architecture, LFA, and LNMF methods, especially in the cases of partial occlusions and local distortions. Keywords: face recognition, part based local representation, ICA, LS-ICA. 1.

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In this paper we present the experimental results of a generic local appearance based face representation approach obtained from the first and fourth experiments of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) version 1 data. The introduced representation approach is compared with the baseline system with the standard distance metrics of L1 norm, L2 norm and cosine angle. The experimental results show that the proposed local appearance based approach provides better and more stable results than the baseline system-holistic Eigenfaces- approach. Since 1990s, with the introduction of Eigenfaces

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A survey of the development of algorithms for enforcing nonnegativity constraints in scientific computation is given. Special emphasis is placed on such constraints in least squares computations in numerical linear algebra and in nonlinear optimization. Techniques involving nonnegative low-rank matrix and tensor factorizations are also emphasized. Details are provided for some important classical and modern applications in science and engineering. For completeness, this report also includes an effort toward a literature survey of the various algorithms and applications of nonnegativity constraints in numerical analysis. Key Words: nonnegativity constraints, nonnegative least squares, matrix and tensor factorizations, image processing, optimization.