Face identification for people image with general background using vector phase field

This paper proposes an automatic identification method of an acquaintance’s face from people image with general background. In this method, we assume that a face in a given image approximately equals to be an Affine transformed (rotated, enlarged/reduced and translated) pattern of registered original one, and that the face pattern is also perturbed by a lighting variation and noise. The recognition method deals with a vector phase field (VPF) that is a normalized gradient vector field obtained from input grey level image. The VPF shows a kind of feature representation for face pattern, while it gives an insensitive feature to lighting variations on the input image. In addition to the representation, we use a region-weighted similarity over the VPF in order to improve the identification accuracy. This paper also presents the experimental results of the proposed method, and illustrates its effectiveness by comparing with non region weighted case.