Face Recognition

Introduction

A facial recognition system is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. It can be used mainly in the areas of security, service, and entertainment.


  1. For security application: one direction is criminal searching, e.g., at customs, transportation, and shopping center. Another direction is alarm alert, e.g., for home, community, card cheating and casino.
  2. For service application: such as VIP service at hotel/bank/airport, etc, help to find the lost person, especially for young and elderly, and advertising push based on age/gender estimation.
  3. For entertainment: such as the application of which star looks like you, automatic photo management and personalized TV show.

     

     

Technical

For a facial recognition system, usually the following steps are needed. i.e., face detection, facial landmark localization, feature extraction and comparison with registered database to give the results. The picture below show a demo created by using our technology:

The demo is to identify a query Image from a dataset of known persons. In this demo screen, images in the bounding boxes are detected query images and the names are the output results. The two numbers indicate the length and height of the face region.

Identifying Images
Our system has the following technology key points:

It is ROBUST to variations in lighting, occlusions, face expressions, poses and face sizes
It is REAL-TIME for face identification.

The Future

The target of the project is to make the application of face recognition on mobile platform and cloud service. The facial landmark localization for mobile application and surveillance will be also developed. Moreover, fast large scale database searching and high speed feature extraction will be considered.


People Involved

Professor: Alex Kot and Jiang XuDong
Researcher: Lu Ze