Studies on Hyperspectral Face Recognition in Visible Spectrum With Feature Band Selection

• Published in: IEEE transactions on systems, man and cybernetics. Part A, Systems and humans Vol. 40; no. 6; pp. 1354 - 1361
• Main Authors: Wei Di, Lei Zhang, Zhang, David, Quan Pan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.2010
• Subjects: Band selection; Band spectra; Bands; Biometrics; Color; Electromagnetic wave absorption; Face detection; Face recognition; Hyperspectral imaging; Hyperspectral sensors; Principal component analysis; principal component analysis (PCA); Remote sensing; Skin; Spectra; Strategy; Tasks; Testing; Visible spectrum
• ISSN: 1083-4427; 1558-2426
• DOI: 10.1109/TSMCA.2010.2052603

This correspondence paper studies face recognition by using hyperspectral imagery in the visible light bands. The spectral measurements over the visible spectrum have different discriminatory information for the task of face identification, and it is found that the absorption bands related to hemoglobin are more discriminative than the other bands. Therefore, feature band selection based on the physical absorption characteristics of face skin is performed, and two feature band subsets are selected. Then, three methods are proposed for hyperspectral face recognition, including whole band (2D) 2 PCA, single band (2D) 2 PCA with decision level fusion, and band subset fusion-based (2D) 2 PCA. A simple yet efficient decision level fusion strategy is also proposed for the latter two methods. To testify the proposed techniques, a hyperspectral face database was established which contains 25 subjects and has 33 bands over the visible light spectrum (0.4-0.72 μm). The experimental results demonstrated that hyperspectral face recognition with the selected feature bands outperforms that by using a single band, using the whole bands, or, interestingly, using the conventional RGB color bands.