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Selective multi-descriptor fusion for face identification

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Abstract

Over the last 2 decades, face identification has been an active field of research in computer vision. As an important class of image representation methods for face identification, fused descriptor-based methods are known to lack sufficient discriminant information, especially when compared with deep learning-based methods. This paper presents a new face representation method, multi-descriptor fusion (MDF), which represents face images through a combination of multiple descriptors, resulting in hyper-high dimensional fused descriptor features. MDF enables excellent performance in face identification, exceeding the state-of-the-art, but it comes with high memory and computational costs. As a solution to the high cost problem, this paper also presents an optimisation method, discriminant ability-based multi-descriptor selection (DAMS), to select a subset of descriptors from the set of 65 initial descriptors whilst maximising the discriminant ability. The MDF face representation, after being refined by DAMS, is named selective multi-descriptor fusion (SMDF). Compared with MDF, SMDF has much smaller feature dimension and is thus usable on an ordinary PC, but still has similar performance. Various experiments are conducted on the CAS-PEAL-R1 and LFW datasets to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods.

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Notes

  1. In terms of LFW dataset, “outside data” is defined as the data that is not part of LFW [13]. As the outside data can have a significant impact on experiments, researchers are asked to be specific about whether or what type of outside training data was used to ensure fair comparison of different methods on LFW [13].

  2. Here, a feature block means a group of features which normally cannot be divided. The features of an instance can consist of many feature blocks. Searching an optimum subset of feature blocks is to find a subset of feature blocks among all feature blocks that can maximise the objective function.

  3. Here the DCP histogram under a certain variable combination is denoted by \(DCP(BNR, BNC, r_{in}, r_{ex})\). In our method, we extract the following DCP histograms for each face image: DCP(6, 5, 2, 3), DCP(6, 5, 3, 4), DCP(6, 5, 4, 5), DCP(6, 5, 5, 6), DCP(5, 4, 2, 3), DCP(5, 4, 3, 4), DCP(5, 4, 4, 5), DCP(5, 4, 5, 6), DCP(4, 4, 2, 3), DCP(4, 4, 3, 4), DCP(4, 4, 4, 5), DCP(4, 4, 5, 6), DCP(3, 2, 2, 3), DCP(3, 2, 3, 4), DCP(3, 2, 4, 5) and DCP(3, 2, 5, 6). So we get 16 DCP histograms in all for each face image. Please note that we didn’t carefully tune these four parameters. According to our experience, the setting of these four parameters will not significantly influence the performance.

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  1. School of Computing, Ulster University, Belfast, UK

    Xin Wei, Hui Wang, Bryan Scotney & Huan Wan

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  1. Xin Wei
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Correspondence to Xin Wei.

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Wei, X., Wang, H., Scotney, B. et al. Selective multi-descriptor fusion for face identification. Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber. 10, 3417–3429 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-019-00929-2

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