A real-time face recognition system using custom VLSI hardware

A real-time face recognition system has been implemented on an IBM compatible personal computer with a video camera, image digitizer, and custom VLSI image correlator chip. With a single frontal facial image under semicontrolled lighting conditions, the system performs (i) image preprocessing and template extraction, (ii) template correlation with a database of 173 images, and (iii) postprocessing of correlation results to identify the user. System performance issues including image preprocessing, face recognition algorithm, software development, and VLSI hardware implementation are addressed. In particular, the parallel, fully pipelined VLSI image correlator is able to perform 340 Mop/second and achieve a speed up of 20 over optimized assembly code on a 80486/66DX2. The complete system is able to identify a user from a database of 173 images of 34 persons in approximately two to three seconds. While the recognition performance of the system is difficult to quantify simply, the system achieves a very conservative 88% recognition rate using cross-validation on the moderately varied database.