The importance of the color information in face recognition

A common feature found in practically all technical approaches proposed for face recognition is the use of only the luminance information associated to the face image. One may wonder if this is due to the low importance of the color information in face recognition or due to other less technical reasons such as the no availability of color image database. Motivated by this reasoning, we have performed a variety of tests using a global eigen approach developed previously, which has been modified to cope with the color information. Our results show that the use of the color information embedded in a eigen approach, improve the recognition rate when compared to the same scheme which uses only the luminance information.