A Report on Automatic Face Recognition: Traditional to Modern Deep Learning Techniques

In the era of smart digital transformation, automatic face recognition is the way of identification and verification of a person in many applications of security and authentication. If the person's 2D still image or 3D video frame is taken under controlled lighting and frontal face poses, then today automatic face recognition is a solved problem with more than 98 % accuracy. Under ideal condition of images, automatic face recognition outperforms manual face recognition rate. But the problem of uncontrolled illumination, occlusion, tilting of faces, different expressions of faces, use of accessories and hair color, growth of facial hair, aging effect of a person and low-resolution images makes automatic face recognition underperform; it gets defeated by human. Unless this problem is solved on real time, automatic face recognition system cannot be trusted for crucial security applications like e-passport, fraud detection, counter terrorism and mug-shot verification etc. Extensive research is underway to improve this technology. Traditionally Harr cascade classifier methods, histogram of oriented gradients (HoG), principal component analysis (PCA), Eigen-faces, and support vector machine (SVM) classifier are used in face recognition. Now modern deep learning innovation has superseded those traditional machine learning techniques with more computing power in GPUs and TPUs to tackle all variations in input image quality and ever-growing face database. The goal of this paper is to report the journey of face recognition system from traditional to modern techniques to increase precision and recall of the system.