Extracting micro-structural gabor features for face recognition

Robustness and discriminability are two key issues in face recognition. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm which extracts micro-structural Gabor feature to achieve good robustness and discriminability simultaneously. We first design a family of directional block partitions to compute the block-level directional projections of the classical Gabor feature. Then we use two statistical kernels, i.e, the mean kernel and the variance kernel, to extract the micro-structural statistics. Analysis of both robustness and discriminability is conducted to show that the new feature is not only more robust to misalignment, but also more discriminative than the classical down-sampling Gabor feature, which is further demonstrated by three groups of experiments on the BANCA dataset.