Fusion of Intra- and Inter-modality Algorithms for Face-Sketch Recognition

Identifying and apprehending suspects by matching sketches created from eyewitness and victim descriptions to mugshot photos is a slow process since law enforcement agencies lack automated methods to perform this task. This paper attempts to tackle this problem by combining Eigentransformation, a global intra-modality approach, with the Eigenpatches local intra-modality technique. These algorithms are then fused with an inter-modality method called Histogram of Averaged Orientation Gradients HAOG. Simulation results reveal that the intra- and inter- modality algorithms considered in this work provide complementary information since not only does fusion of the global and local intra-modality methods yield better performance than either of the algorithms individually, but fusion with the inter-modality approach yields further improvement to achieve retrieval rates of 94.05% at Rank-100 on 420 photo-sketch pairs. This performance is achieved at Rank-25 when filtering of the gallery using demographic information is carried out.