Recognition of identical twins using fusion of various facial feature extractors

Distinguishing identical twins using their face images is a challenge in biometrics. The goal of this study is to construct a biometric system that is able to give the correct matching decision for the recognition of identical twins. We propose a method that uses feature-level fusion, score-level fusion, and decision-level fusion with principal component analysis, histogram of oriented gradients, and local binary patterns feature extractors. In the experiments, face images of identical twins from ND-TWINS-2009-2010 database were used. The results show that the proposed method is better than the state-of-the-art methods for distinguishing identical twins. Variations in illumination, expression, gender, and age of identical twins’ faces were also considered in this study. The experimental results of all variation cases demonstrated that the most effective method to distinguish identical twins is the proposed method compared to the other approaches implemented in this study. The lowest equal error rates of identical twins recognition that are achieved using the proposed method are 2.07% for natural expression, 0.0% for smiling expression, and 2.2% for controlled illumination compared to 4.5, 4.2, and 4.7% equal error rates of the best state-of-the-art algorithm under the same conditions. Additionally, the proposed method is compared with the other methods for non-twins using the same database and standard FERET subsets. The results achieved by the proposed method for non-twins identification are also better than all the other methods under expression, illumination, and aging variations.