Significant jet point for facial image representation and recognition

Gabor wavelet related feature extraction and classification is an important topic in image analysis and pattern recognition. Gabor features can be used either holistically or analytically. While holistic approaches involve significant computational complexity, existing analytic approaches require explicit correspondence of predefined feature points for classification. Different from these approaches, this paper presents a new analytic Gabor method for face recognition. The proposed method attaches Gabor features on a set of shape-driven sparse points to describe both geometric and textural information. Neither the number nor the correspondence of these points is needed. A variant of Hausdorff distance is employed to recognize faces. The experiments performed on AR database demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is effective to identify individuals in various circumstances, such as under expression and illumination changes.