High quality face recognition in JPEG compressed images

This paper presents an advanced face recognition system that is based on the use of Pseudo 2-D HMMs and coefficients of the 2-D DCT as features. A major advantage of our approach is the fact that our face recognition system works directly with JPEG-compressed face images, i.e. it uses directly the DCT-features provided by the JPEG standard, without any necessity of completely decompressing the image before recognition. The recognition rates on the Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) face database are 100% for the original images and 99.5% for JPEG compressed domain recognition. A comparison with other face recognition systems evaluated on the ORL database, shows that these are the best recognition results on this database