Fusion of appearance-based face recognition algorithms

Although many algorithms have been proposed, face recognition and verification systems can guarantee a good level of performances only for controlled environments. In order to improve the performance and robustness of face recognition and verification systems, multi-modal and mono-modal systems based on the fusion of multiple recognisers using different or similar biometrics have been proposed, especially for verification purposes. In this paper, a recognition and verification system based on the combination of two well-known appearance-based representations of the face, namely, principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), is proposed. Both PCA and LDA are used as feature extractors from frontal view images. The benefits of such a fusion are shown for different environmental conditions, namely, ideal conditions, characterised by a very limited variability of environmental parameters, and real conditions with a large variability of lighting, scale and facial expression.