Biometric Face Authentication Using Pixel-Based Weak Classifiers

The performance of face authentication systems has steadily improved over the last few years. State-of-the-art methods use the projection of the gray-scale face image into a Linear Discriminant subspace as input of a classifier such as Support Vector Machines or Multi-layer Perceptrons. Unfortunately, these classifiers involve thousands of parameters that are difficult to store on a smart-card for instance. Recently, boosting algorithms has emerged to boost the performance of simple (weak) classifiers by combining them iteratively. The famous AdaBoost algorithm have been proposed for object detection and applied successfully to face detection. In this paper, we investigate the use of AdaBoost for face authentication to boost weak classifiers based simply on pixel values. The proposed approach is tested on a benchmark database, namely XM2VTS. Results show that boosting only hundreds of classifiers achieved near state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, the proposed approach outperforms similar work on face authentication using boosting algorithms on the same database.