Facial marks: Soft biometric for face recognition

We propose to utilize micro features, namely facial marks (e.g., freckles, moles, and scars) to improve face recognition and retrieval performance. Facial marks can be used in three ways: i) to supplement the features in an existing face matcher, ii) to enable fast retrieval from a large database using facial mark based queries, and iii) to enable matching or retrieval from a partial or profile face image with marks. We use Active Appearance Model (AAM) to locate and segment primary facial features (e.g., eyes, nose, and mouth). Then, Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LoG) and morphological operators are used to detect facial marks. Experimental results based on FERET (426 images, 213 subjects) and Mugshot (1,225 images, 671 subjects) databases show that the use of facial marks improves the rank-1 identification accuracy of a state-of-the-art face recognition system from 92.96% to 93.90% and from 91.88% to 93.14%, respectively.