Face recognition using augmented local binary pattern and Bray Curtis dissimilarity metric

The panorama of face recognition is to find the dissimilarity features that can be used to discriminate individuals for their recognition. The holistic face recognition methods available in the literature perform well in the controlled environments. These methods may not appropriate to identify people through their faces in uncontrolled environments such as changes in pose, facial expression and illumination. However, the feature based methods address the issues of face recognition in uncontrolled environments to a certain extent. Therefore, the biometric researchers are trying to devise the face recognition methods that perform optimally in uncontrolled environments. This paper presents a novel method of face recognition in uncontrolled environments that works with local binary pattern of facial images and compute the dissimilarity among them using Bray Curtis dissimilarity metric. A novel concept of filtering the LBP surface texture is developed. The proposed method we called as “augmented local binary” pattern ((ALBP)) works on a combination of the principle of locality of uniform and non-uniform patterns. It replaces non-uniform patterns with the majority value of uniform patterns and combined with neighboring uniform patterns to extract valuable information regarding local descriptors. The proposed method is tested on different databases consisting uncontrolled facial images such as extended Yale B, Yale A and our database. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs better at recognizing faces in uncontrolled environments such as the facial expression, illumination, and mild pose changes.