Strengthening surf descriptor with discriminant image filter learning: application to face recognition

Face recognition in extreme situations is still challenging to researchers. While several algorithms have shown great recognition results in ideal conditions, accuracy decreases when recognition tasks present a high illumination variation. In this paper, we propose to add two components to the recognition system to make the surf descriptor efficient in such extreme situations. First, we learn a discriminant image filter that maximizes the discrimination of surf. Second, the obtained discriminant SURF(d-surf) is further strengthened by using multispectral images instead of broad band images. DSURF and multispectral d-surf (MD-SURF) were evaluated against two face databases: the feret database, which served as a benchmark, and the iris-m³ multispectral face database, which presented sun lighted faces. Our algorithms have been evaluated against three state-of-the-art algorithms that are MBLBP, HGPP and LGBPHS. The results validated the superiority of D-SURF over the traditional surf descriptor, while MD-SURF performed best out of all studied algorithms.