Who Are You? - Real-time Person Identification

This paper presents a system for person identification that uses concise statistical models of facial features in a real-time realisation of the cast identification system of Everingham et al. [7]. Our system integrates the cascaded face detector of Viola and Jones with a kernel-based regressor for face tracking, which is trained on-line when new people are detected in the video stream. A pictorial model is used to compute the locations of facial features, which form a descriptor of the person’s face. When sufficient samples are collected, identification is performed using a random-ferns classifier by marginalising over the facial features. This confers robustness to localisation errors and occlusions, while enabling a real-time search of the database. These four different processes communicate within a real-time framework capable of tracking and identifying up to 5 people in real-time on a standard dual-core 1.86GHz machine.