A New Gabor Phase Difference Pattern for Face and Ear Recognition

A new local feature based image representation method is proposed. It is derived from the local Gabor phase difference pattern (LGPDP). This method represents images by exploiting relationships of Gabor phase between pixel and its neighbors. There are two main contributions: 1) a novel phase difference measure is defined; 2) new encoding rules to mirror Gabor phase difference information are designed. Because of them, this method describes Gabor phase difference more precisely than the conventional LGPDP. Moreover, it could discard useless information and redundancy produced near quadrant boundary, which commonly exist in LGPDP. It is shown that the proposed method brings higher discriminative ability to Gabor phase based pattern. Experiments are conducted on the FRGC version 2.0 and USTB Ear Database to evaluate its validity and generalizability. The proposed method is also compared with several state-of-the-art approaches. It is observed that our method achieves the highest recognition rates among them.