Viewpoint Unconstrained Face Recognition Based on Affine Local Descriptors and Probabilistic Similarity

Face recognition under controlled settings, such as limited viewpoint and illumination change, can achieve good performance nowadays. However, real world application for face recognition is still challenging. In this paper, we propose using the combination of Affine Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Probabilistic Similarity for face recognition under a large viewpoint change. Affine SIFT is an extension of SIFT algorithm to detect affine invariant local descriptors. Affine SIFT generates a series of different viewpoints using affine transformation. In this way, it allows for a viewpoint difference between the gallery face and probe face. However, the human face is not planar as it contains significant 3D depth. Affine SIFT does not work well for significant change in pose. To complement this, we combined it with probabilistic similarity, which gets the log likelihood between the probe and gallery face based on sum of squared difference (SSD) distribution in an offline learning process. Our experiment results show that our framework achieves impressive better recognition accuracy than other algorithms compared on the FERET database.