In this work, we proposed a novel method, called Local Modified Zernike Moment per unit Mass (LMZMPM), for face recognition, which is invariant to illumination, scaling, noise, in-plane rotation, and translation, along with other orthogonal and inherent properties of the Zernike Moments (ZMs). The proposed LMZMPM is computed for each pixel in a neighborhood of size 3 × 3 , and then considers the complex tuple that contains both the phase and magnitude coefficients of LMZMPM as the extracted features. As it contains both the phase and the magnitude components of the complex feature, it has more information about the image and thus preserves both the edge and structural information. We also propose a hybrid similarity measure, combining the Jaccard Similarity with the L1 distance, and applied to the extracted feature set for classification. The feasibility of the proposed LMZMPM technique on varying illumination has been evaluated on the CMU-PIE and the extended Yale B databases with an average Rank-1 Recognition (R1R) accuracy of 99.8% and 98.66% respectively. To assess the reliability of the method with variations in noise, rotation, scaling, and translation, we evaluate it on the AR database and obtain an average R1R higher than that of recent state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method shows a very high recognition rate on Heterogeneous Face Recognition as well, with 100% on CUFS, and 98.80% on CASIA-HFB.

This paper proposes a novel local feature descriptor coined as a local instant-and-center-symmetric neighbor-based pattern of the extrema-images (LINPE) to detect breast abnormalities in thermal breast images. It is a hybrid descriptor that combines two different feature descriptors: one is the inverse-probability difference extrema (IpDE), and another is the local instant and center-symmetric neighbor-based pattern (LICsNP). IpDE is developed to compute the intensity-inhomogeneity-invariant feature-based image of the breast thermogram. Besides, the LICsNP is intended to capture the local microstructure pattern information in the IpDE image. A new paradigm, named Broad Learning (BL) network, is introduced here as a classifier to differentiate the healthy and sick breast thermograms efficiently. The efficacy of the proposed system is quantitatively validated on the images of DMR-IR and DBT-TU-JU databases. Extensive experimentation on these databases with an average accuracy of 96.90% and 94%, respectively, justifies proposed system's superiority in the differentiation of healthy and sick breast thermograms over the other related existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed system also performs consistently in the presence of noise and rotational changes.

Segmentation of suspicious regions (SRs) of a thermal breast image (TBI) is a very significant and challenging problem for the identification of breast cancer. Therefore, in this work, we have proposed an active contour model for the segmentation of the SRs in TBI. The proposed segmentation method combines three significant steps. First, a novel method, called smaller-peaks corresponding to the high-intensity-pixels and the centroid-knowledge of SRs (SCH-CS), is proposed to approximately locate the SRs, whose contours are later used as the initial evolving curves of the level set method (LSM). Second, a new energy functional, called different local priorities embedded (DLPE), is proposed regarding the level set function. DLPE is then minimized using the interleaved level set evolution to segment the potential SRs in TBI more accurately. Finally, a new stopping criterion is incorporated into the proposed LSM. The proposed LSM not only increases the segmentation speed but also ameliorates the segmentation accuracy. The performance of our SR segmentation method was evaluated on two TBI databases, namely, DMR-IR and DBT-TU-JU, and the average segmentation accuracies obtained on these databases are 72.18% and 71.26% respectively, which are better than the other state-of-the-art methods. Beside this, a novel framework to analyze TBIs is proposed for differentiating abnormal and normal breasts on the basis of the segmented SRs. We have also shown experimentally that investigating only the SRs instead of the whole breast is more effective in differentiating abnormal and normal breasts.