Cooperative distributed registration for robust face recognition

This paper describes a cooperative distributed registration system for efficient acquisition of a set of facial images required in realization of robust face recognition. In this system, a lot of agents consisting of a camera and a processor are arranged, and the person detection and tracking as well as registration of facial images are integratively realized. By configuring the cooperative mechanism of this system into a three-layer structure, the required communication capacity is reduced and efficient cooperative operation is realized. In the first layer, each agent independently performs the detection and two-dimensional tracking of the target person. In the second layer, the robust three-dimensional tracking is realized by cooperating agents themselves who are tracking a particular target person within an agency. In the third layer, by the cooperation among agencies, the agency configuration is dynamically changed in accordance with the position and registration conditions of the target person, and the effective registration is realized by changing over the target person of each camera. We will present the experimental results based on a system constructed with eight cameras and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 33(14): 91–100, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.1179