In this paper, a robust face recognition algorithm is proposed, which is based on the elastic graph matching (EGM) and discriminative feature analysis algorithm. We introduce a cost function for the EGM taking account of variations in face pose and facial expressions, and propose its optimization procedure. Our proposed cost function uses a set of Gabor-wavelet-based features, called robust jet, which are robust against the variations. The robust jet is defined in terms of discrete Fourier transform coefficients of Gabor coefficients. To cope with the difference between face poses of test face and reference faces, 2 x 2 warping matrix is incorporated in the proposed cost function. For the discriminative feature analysis, linear projection discriminant analysis and kernel-based projection discriminant analysis are introduced. These methods are motivated to solve the small-size problem of training samples. The basic idea of PDA is that a class is represented by a subspace spanned by some training samples of the class instead of using sample mean vector, that the distance from a pattern to a class is defined by using the error vector between the pattern and its projection to the subspace representing the class, and that an optimum feature selection rule is developed using the distance concept in a similar way as in the conventional linear discriminant analysis. In order to evaluate the performance of our face recognition algorithm, we carried out some experiments using the well-known FERET face database, and compared the performance with recently developed approaches. We observed that our algorithm outperformed the compared approaches.

Face detection in an image sequence is a challenging problem for many applications. In this paper, a novel face detection method is proposed. In order to detect faces in a sequence, based on Bayesian decision theory, we construct a unified framework of most face-like region selection, face/non-face classification, and detection result correction. And we propose face probability gradient ascent method to estimate the optimal position, scale, and rotation parameters of each face. In the experimental results, it is shown that the proposed method is more accurate and efficient than other conventional detection methods.