Face recognition using a pictorial-edit distance

A new face recognition algorithm is introduced that is based on finding an optimal mapping between two images and measuring the properties of the mapping to determine the similarity between the two images. This new method is shown to be extremely robust to variations in pose, camera position and lighting for the problem of face recognition especially in an uncontrolled environment such as video surveillance. The technique does not depend on locating or training on facial features and can be applied in general to any object recognition problem. We present recognition results on current databases available to the research community and will demonstrate a real-time version of the software for access control and surveillance applications at the conference.