Date of Award

9-2017

Document Type

Project

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

School of Computer Science and Engineering

First Reader/Committee Chair

Qiao, Haiyan

Abstract

Facial recognition is the process in which a sample face can be correctly identified by a machine amongst a group of different faces. With the never-ending need for improvement in the fields of security, surveillance, and identification, facial recognition is becoming increasingly important. Considering this importance, it is imperative that the correct faces are recognized and the error rate is as minimal as possible. Despite the wide variety of current methods for facial recognition, there is no clear cut best method. This project reviews and examines three different methods for facial recognition: Eigenfaces, Fisherfaces, and Local Binary Patterns to determine which method has the highest accuracy of prediction rate. The three methods are reviewed and then compared via experiments. OpenCV, CMake, and Visual Studios were used as tools to conduct experiments. Analysis were conducted to identify which method has the highest accuracy of prediction rate with various experimental factors. By feeding a number of sample images of different people which serve as experimental subjects. The machine is first trained to generate features for each person among the testing subjects. Then, a new image was tested against the “learned” data and be labeled as one of the subjects. With experimental data analysis, the Eigenfaces method was determined to have the highest prediction rate of the three algorithms tested. The Local Binary Pattern Histogram (LBP) was found to have the lowest prediction rate. Finally, LBP was selected for the algorithm improvement. In this project, LBP was improved by identifying the most significant regions of the histograms for each person in training time. The weights of each region are assigned depending on the gray scale contrast. At recognition time, given a new face, different weights are assigned to different regions to increase prediction rate and also speed up the real time recognition. The experimental results confirmed the performance improvement.

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