A MATLAB based Face Recognition System using
Automatic recognition of people is a challenging problem which has received much attention during recent years due to its many applications in different fields. Face recognition is one of those challenging problems and up to date, there is no technique that provides a robust solution to all situations. This paper presents a new technique for human face recognition. This technique uses an image based approach towards artificial intelligence by removing redundant data from face images through image compression using the two dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D DCT) The DCT extracts features from face images based on skin color. Featurevectors are constructed by computing DCT coefficients. A self organizing map (SOM) using an unsupervised learning technique is used to classify DCT based feature vectors into groups to identify if the subject in the input image is "present" or "not present" in the image database. Face recognition with SOM is carried out by classifying intensity values of grayscale pixels into different groups. Evaluation was performed in MATLAB using an image database of 25 face images, containing five subjects and each subject having 5 images with different facial expressions. After training for approximately 850 epochs the system achieved a recognition rate of 81.36% for 10 consecutive trials. The main advantage of this technique is its high speed processing capability and low computational requirements, in terms of both speed and memory utilization. Keywords Face recognition, discrete cosine transform, self organizing map, neural network, artificial intelligence.