Local appearance based face recognition method using block based steerable pyramid transform

In this paper, an efficient local appearance feature extraction method based on Steerable Pyramid (S-P) wavelet transform is proposed for face recognition. Local information is extracted by computing the statistics of each sub-block obtained by dividing S-P sub-bands. The obtained local features of each sub-band are combined at the feature and decision level to enhance face recognition performance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of S-P as feature extraction method for face recognition. The proposed approach is compared with some related feature extraction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), as well as linear discriminant analysis LDA and boosted LDA. Different multi-resolution transforms, wavelet (DWT), gabor, curvelet and contourlet, are also compared against the block-based S-P method. Experimental results on ORL, Yale, Essex and FERET face databases convince us that the proposed method provides a better representation of the class information, and obtains much higher recognition accuracies in real-world situations including changes in pose, expression and illumination. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.