Polymorphous Facial Trait Code

The recently proposed Facial Trait Code (FTC) formulates the component-based face recognition problem as a coding problem using Error-Correcting Code. The development of FTC is based on the extraction of local feature patterns from a large set of faces without significant variations in expression and illumination. This paper reports a new type of FTC that encompasses the faces with large expression variation and under various illumination conditions. We assume that if the patches of a local feature on two different faces look similar in appearance, this pair of patches will also show similar visual patterns when both faces change expressions and are under different illumination conditions. With this assumption, we propose the Polymorphous Facial Trait Code for face recognition under illumination and expression variations. The proposed method outperforms the original Facial Trait Code substantially in solving a strict face verification problem, in which only one facial image per individual is available for enrolling to the gallery set, and the probe set consists of facial images with strong illumination and expression variations.