Decision-based neural network for face recognition system

This paper proposes a face recognition system based on decision-based neural networks (DBNN). The DBNN adopts a hierarchical network structure with nonlinear basis functions and a competitive credit-assignment scheme. The face recognition system consists of three modules. First, a face detector finds the location of a human face in an image. Then an eye localizer determines the positions of both eyes to help generate size-normalized, reoriented, and reduced-resolution feature vectors. (The facial region proposed contains eyebrows, eyes, and nose, but excluding mouth. Eye-glasses will be permissible.) The last module is a face recognizer. The DBNN can be effectively applied to all the three modules. The DBNN based face recognizer has yielded very high recognition accuracies based on experiments on the ARPA-FERET and SCR-IM databases. In terms of processing speeds and recognition accuracies, the performance of DBNN is superior to that of multilayer perceptron (MLP). The training phase for 100 persons would take around one hour, while the recognition phase (including eye localization, feature extraction, and classification using DBNN) consumes only a fraction of a second (on Sparc10).