Combining Facial Skin Mark and Eigenfaces for Face Recognition

In this paper we investigate the use of facial skin mark information for biometric person verification. We performed statistical analysis of the facial skin mark information. The position, size and color intensity of the skin marks are considered as features for skin mark based face matching. Developed facial skin mark matcher has good performance, but can not be applied to faces with no detected skin marks. Due to non-universality of skin mark information, a novel combination algorithm of traditional Eigenfaces matcher with skin mark matcher has been proposed. The resulting combined face matcher has universality property and delivers better performance than either single matcher. The AR Face Database was used in experiments.