Robust Face Recognition Using Color Information

This paper presents a robust face recognition method using color information with the following three-fold contributions. First, a novel hybrid color space, the

RC

r

Q

color space, is constructed out of three different color spaces: the

RGB

,

YC

b

C

r

, and

YIQ

color spaces. The

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hybrid color space, whose component images possess complementary characteristics, enhances the discriminating power for face recognition. Second, three effective image encoding methods are proposed for the component images in the

RC

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hybrid color space: (i) a patch-based Gabor image representation for the

R

component image, (ii) a multi-resolution LBP feature fusion scheme for the

C

r

component image, and (iii) a component-based DCT multiple face encoding for the

Q

component image. Finally, at the decision level, the similarity matrices generated using the three component images in the

RC

r

Q

hybrid color space are fused using a weighted sum rule. The most challenging Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) version 2 Experiment 4 shows that the proposed method, which achieves the face verification rate of 92.43% at the false accept rate of 0.1%, performs better than the state-of-the-art face recognition methods.