In-plane Rotational Alignment of Faces by Eye and Eye-pair Detection

In face recognition, face rotation alignment is an important part of the recognition process. In this paper, we present a hierarchical detector system using eye and eye-pair detectors combined with a geometrical method for calculating the in-plane angle of a face image. Two feature extraction methods, the restricted Boltzmann machine and the histogram of oriented gradients, are compared to extract feature vectors from a sliding window. Then a support vector machine is used to accurately localize the eyes. After the eye coordinates are obtained through our eye detector, the in-plane angle is estimated by calculating the arc-tangent of horizontal and vertical parts of the distance between left and right eye center points. By using this calculated in-plane angle, the face is subsequently rotationally aligned. We tested our approach on three different face datasets: IMM, Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and FERET. Moreover, to compare the effect of rotational aligning on face recognition performance, we performed experiments using a face recognition method using rotationally aligned and non-aligned face images from the IMM dataset. The results show that our method calculates the in-plane rotation angle with high precision and this leads to a significant gain in face recognition performance.