Extended local binary pattern fusion for face recognition

This paper presents a simple, novel, yet highly effective approach for robust face recognition. Given LBP-like descriptors based on local accumulated pixel differences, Angular Differences (AD) and Radial Differences (RD), the local differences are decomposed into complementary components of signs and magnitudes. The proposed descriptors have desirable features: (1) robustness to lighting, pose, and expression; (2) computation efficiency; (3) encoding of both microstructures and macrostructures; (4) consistent in form with traditional LBP, thus inheriting the merits of LBP; and (5) no required training, improving generalizability. From a given face image, we obtain six histogram features, each of which is obtained by concatenating spatial histograms extracted from nonoverlapping subregions. The Whitened PCA technique is used for dimensionality reduction, followed by Nearest Neighbor classification. We have evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method on the Extended Yale B and CAS-PEAL-R1 databases. The proposed method impressively outperforms other well known systems, including what we believe to be the best reported performance for the the CAS-PEAL-R1 lighting probe set with a recognition rate of 72.3%.