Current Projects

Matching and Retrieving of Face Images Based on Facial Marks

Soft biometric traits embedded in a face (e.g., gender and facial marks) are ancillary information and are not fully distinctive by themselves in face recognition tasks. However, this information can be explicitly combined with face matching score to improve the overall face recognition accuracy. Moreover, in certain application domains, e.g., visual surveillance, where a face image is occluded or is captured in off-frontal pose, soft biometric traits can provide even more valuable information for face matching or retrieval. Facial marks can also be useful to differentiate identical twins whose global facial appearances are very similar. The similarities found from soft biometrics can also be useful as a source of evidence in courts of law because they are more descriptive than the numerical matching scores generated by a traditional face matcher. We propose to utilize demographic information (e.g., gender and ethnicity) and facial marks (e.g., scars, moles, and freckles) for improving face image matching and retrieval performance. An automatic facial mark detection method has been developed that uses 1) the active appearance model for locating primary facial features (e.g., eyes, nose, and mouth), 2) the Laplacian-of-Gaussian blob detection, and 3) morphological operators.

B. Klare, A. A. Paulino, and A. K. Jain, "Analysis of Facial Features in Identical Twins", IJCB, Washington, DC, Oct. 11-13, 2011.

U. Park and A. K. Jain, "Face Matching and Retrieval Using Soft Biometrics," IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 406-415, 2010.

A. K. Jain and U. Park, "Facial Marks: Soft Biometric For Face Recognition," Proc. of Int. Conf. on Image Processing (ICIP), 2009.