Improved Real-Time Face Recognition based on three Level wavelet Decomposition-Principal Component Analysis and Mahalanobis Distance

The development of research in the field of real-time face recognition is a study that is being developed in the last decade. Face recognition is used to identify person from an image or video. Recognition rate and computation time of real-time face recognition is one of the big challenges that must be developed. This study proposes a model of face recognition using the method of feature extraction by combining three level wavelet decomposition and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and using the method of mahalanobis distance for the classification section (3WPCA-MD). A 3-level wavelet decomposition is used to decompose images by reducing the resolution used for those images. Using wavelet decomposition up to level 3 will produce an image with a very low resolution so as to reduce the value of the resulting computation time to be processed using PCA. Mahalanobis distance method is used to determine the degree of similarity among the features to produce a more optimal face recognition. Based on the results of experiments that have been done, they generated improved face recognition with high face recognition accuracy of up to 96% in average and produced faster computation results of face recognition if compared to ordinary PCA method. The average computation speed value obtained using the method of 3WPCA-MD was 5-7 milli-second (ms) for each face recognition process.