Robust Face Recognition using Key-point Descriptors

Key-point based techniques have demonstrated a good performance for recognition of various objects in numerous computer vision applications. This paper investigates the use of some of the most popular key-point descriptors for face recognition. The emphasis is put on the experimental performance evaluation of the key-point based face recognition methods against some of the most popular and best performing techniques, utilising both global (Eigenfaces) and local (LBP, Gabor filters) information extracted from the whole face image. Most of the results reported in literature so far, on the use of the key-points descriptors for the face recognition, concluded that the methods based on processing of the full face image have somewhat better performances than methods using exclusively key-points. The results reported in this paper suggest that the performance of the key-point based methods could be at least comparable to the leading “whole face” methods and are often better suited to handle face recognition in practical applications, as they do not require face image co-registration, and perform well even with significantly occluded faces.