In this paper, we propose a method to apply the popular cascade classifier into face recognition to improve the computational efficiency while keeping high recognition rate. In large scale face recognition systems, because the probability of feature templates coming from different subjects is very high, most of the matching pairs will be rejected by the early stages of the cascade. Therefore, the cascade can improve the matching speed significantly. On the other hand, using the nested structure of the cascade, we could drop some stages at the end of feature to reduce the memory and bandwidth usage in some resources intensive system while not sacrificing the performance too much. The cascade is learned by two steps. Firstly, some kind of prepared features are grouped into several nested stages. And then, the threshold of each stage is learned to achieve user defined verification rate (VR). In the paper, we take a landmark based Gabor+LDA face recognition system as baseline to illustrate the process and advantages of the proposed method. However, the use of this method is very generic and not limited in face recognition, which can be easily generalized to other biometrics as a post-processing module. Experiments on the FERET database show the good performance of our baseline and an experiment on a self-collected large scale database illustrates that the cascade can improve the matching speed significantly.
Linear discriminant analysis with nearest neighborhood classifier (LDA + NN) has been commonly used in face recognition, but it often confronts with two problems in real applications: (1) it cannot incrementally deal with the information of training instances; (2) it cannot achieve fast search against large scale gallery set. In this paper, we use incremental LDA (ILDA) and hashing based search method to deal with these two problems. Firstly two incremental LDA algorithms are proposed under spectral regression framework, namely exact incremental spectral regression discriminant analysis (EI-SRDA) and approximate incremental spectral regression discriminant analysis (AI-SRDA). Secondly we propose a similarity hashing algorithm of sub-linear complexity to achieve quick recognition from large gallery set. Experiments on FRGC and self-collected 100,000 faces database show the effective of our methods. We present a novel Locality-Sensitive Hashing scheme for the Approximate Nearest Neighbor Problem under lp norm, based on p-stable distributions.Our scheme improves the running time of the earlier algorithm for the case of the lp norm. It also yields the first known provably efficient approximate NN algorithm for the case p<1. We also show that the algorithm finds the exact near neigbhor in O(log n) time for data satisfying certain "bounded growth" condition.Unlike earlier schemes, our LSH scheme works directly on points in the Euclidean space without embeddings. Consequently, the resulting query time bound is free of large factors and is simple and easy to implement. Our experiments (on synthetic data sets) show that the our data structure is up to 40 times faster than kd-tree. 