Face recognition by elastic bunch graph matching

We present a system for recognizing human faces from single images out of a large database containing one image per person. Faces are represented by labeled graphs, based on a Gabor wavelet transform. Image graphs of new faces are extracted by an elastic graph matching process and can be compared by a simple similarity function. The system differs from Lades et al. (1993) in three respects. Phase information is used for accurate node positioning. Object-adapted graphs are used to handle large rotations in depth. Image graph extraction is based on a novel data structure, the bunch graph, which is constructed from a small set of sample image graphs.