Active Shape Model of Combining Pca and Ica: Application to Facial Feature Extraction

Active Shape Model (ASM) is a powerful statistical tool to extract the facial features of a face image under frontal view. It mainly relies on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to statistically model the variability in the training set of example shapes. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has been proven to be more efficient to extract face features than PCA . In this paper, we combine the PCA and ICA by the consecutive strategy to form a novel ASM. Firstly, an initial model, which shows the global shape variability in the training set, is generated by the PCA-based ASM. And then, the final shape model, which contains more local characters, is established by the ICA-based ASM. Experimental results verify that the accuracy of facial feature extraction is statistically significantly improved by applying the ICA modes after the PCA modes.