Face Recognition in Color Using Complex and Hypercomplex Representations

Color has plenty of discriminative information that can be used to improve the performance of face recognition algorithms, although it is difficult to use it because of its high variability. In this paper we investigate the use of the quaternion representation of a color image for face recognition. We also propose a new representation for color images based on complex numbers. These two color representation methods are compared with the traditional grayscale and RGB representations using an eigenfaces based algorithm for identity verification. The experimental results show that the proposed method gives a very significant improvement when compared to using only the illuminance information.