Emulating biological strategies for uncontrolled face recognition

Face recognition technology is of great significance for applications involving national security and crime prevention. Despite enormous progress in this field, machine-based system is still far from the goal of matching the versatility and reliability of human face recognition. In this paper, we show that a simple system designed by emulating biological strategies of human visual system can largely surpass the state-of-the-art performance on uncontrolled face recognition. In particular, the proposed system integrates dual retinal texture and color features for face representation, an incremental robust discriminant model for high level face coding, and a hierarchical cue-fusion method for similarity qualification. We demonstrate the strength of the system on the large-scale face verification task following the evaluation protocol of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) version 2 Experiment 4. The results are surprisingly well: Its modules significantly outperform their state-of-the-art counterparts, such as Gabor image representation, local binary patterns, and enhanced Fisher linear discriminant model. Furthermore, applying the integrated system to the FRGC version 2 Experiment 4, the verification rate at the false acceptance rate of 0.1 percent reaches to 93.12 percent.