A Facial Feature Area Extraction Method for Improving Face Recognition Rate in Camera Image

Face recognition is a technology to extract feature from a facial image, learn the features through various algorithms, and recognize a person by comparing the learned data with feature of a new facial image. Especially, in order to improve the rate of face recognition, face recognition requires various processing methods. In the training stage of face recognition, feature should be extracted from a facial image. As for the existing method of extracting facial feature, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is being mainly used. The LDA method is to express a facial image with dots on the high-dimensional space, and extract facial feature to distinguish a person by analyzing the class information and the distribution of dots. As the position of a dot is determined by pixel values of a facial image on the high-dimensional space, if unnecessary areas or frequently changing areas are included on a facial image, incorrect facial feature could be extracted by LDA. Especially, if a camera image is used for face recognition, the size of a face could vary with the distance between the face and the camera, deteriorating the rate of face recognition. Thus, in order to solve this problem, this paper detected a facial area by using a camera, removed unnecessary areas using the facial feature area calculated via a Gabor filter, and normalized the size of the facial area. Facial feature were extracted through LDA using the normalized facial image and were learned through the artificial neural network for face recognition. As a result, it was possible to improve the rate of face recognition by approx. 13% compared to the existing face recognition method including unnecessary areas.