Wavelet-based face verification for constrained platforms

Human Identification based on facial images is one of the most challenging tasks in comparison to identification based on other biometric features such as fingerprints, palm prints or iris. Facial recognition is the most natural and suitable method of identification for security related applications. This paper is concerned with wavelet-based schemes for efficient face verification suitable for implementation on devices that are constrained in memory size and computational power such as PDA's and smartcards. Beside minimal storage requirements we should apply as few as possible pre-processing procedures that are often needed to deal with variation in recoding conditions. We propose the LL-coefficients wavelet-transformed face images as the feature vectors for face verification, and compare its performance of PCA applied in the LL-subband at levels 3,4 and 5. We shall also compare the performance of various versions of our scheme, with those of well-established PCA face verification schemes on the BANCA database as well as the ORL database. In many cases, the wavelet-only feature vector scheme has the best performance while maintaining efficacy and requiring minimal pre-processing steps. The significance of these results is their efficiency and suitability for platforms of constrained computational power and storage capacity (e.g. smartcards). Moreover, working at or beyond level 3 LL-subband results in robustness against high rate compression and noise interference.