Beyond Eigenfaces: Probabilistic Matching for Face Recognition

We propose a novel technique for direct visual matching of images for the purposes of face recognition and database search. Speci cally, we argue in favor of a probabilistic measure of similarity, in contrast to simpler methods which are based on standard L2 norms (e.g., template matching) or subspace-restricted norms (e.g., eigenspace matching). The proposed similarity measure is based on a Bayesian analysis of image di erences: we model two mutually exclusive classes of variation between two facial images: intra-personal (variations in appearance of the same individual, due to di erent expressions or lighting) and extra-personal (variations in appearance due to a di erence in identity). The high-dimensional probability density functions for each respective class are then obtained from training data using an eigenspace density estimation technique and subsequently used to compute a similarity measure based on the a posterioriprobability of membership in the intrapersonal class, which is used to rank matches in the database. The performance advantage of this probabilistic matching technique over standard nearest-neighbor eigenspace matching is demonstrated using results from ARPA's 1996 \FERET" face recognition competition, in which this algorithm was found to be the top performer.