Bayesian Modeling of Facial Similarity

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11 (NIPS 1998)

Bibtex Metadata Paper

Authors

Baback Moghaddam, Tony Jebara, Alex Pentland

Abstract

In previous work [6, 9, 10], we advanced a new technique for direct visual matching of images for the purposes of face recognition and image retrieval , using a probabilistic measure of similarity based primarily on a Bayesian (MAP) analysis of image differ(cid:173) ences, leading to a "dual" basis similar to eigenfaces [13]. The performance advantage of this probabilistic matching technique over standard Euclidean nearest-neighbor eigenface matching was recently demonstrated using results from DARPA's 1996 "FERET" face recognition competition, in which this probabilistic matching algorithm was found to be the top performer. We have further developed a simple method of replacing the costly com put ion of nonlinear (online) Bayesian similarity measures by the relatively inexpensive computation of linear (offline) subspace projections and simple (online) Euclidean norms, thus resulting in a significant computational speed-up for implementation with very large image databases as typically encountered in real-world applications.