Face recognition with enhanced local gabor binary pattern from human fixations

Performance of automatic face recognition algorithm has increased considerably over the past decades. However, face recognition under changes in lighting conditions remains a challenging issue for computers. In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition algorithm inspired by information taken from human fixation patterns. We augment a LGBP (Local Gabor Binary Pattern) algorithm - a well-known face recognition algorithm - to allocate different weights to each facial part during processing. For deriving the weights, we analyzed data from a human face recognition experiment using eye-tracking. Eye-tracking allows us to determine the facial parts during the recognition process which represent salient regions for human processing. Face images are pre-processed during the recognition step using a weight mask based on the salient regions from the eye-tracking data. A comparison with the standard non-weighted LGBP approach demonstrates the efficacy of our method with the weighted method performing better under lighting changes.