Monogenic Binary Coding: An Efficient Local Feature Extraction Approach to Face Recognition

Local-feature-based face recognition (FR) methods, such as Gabor features encoded by local binary pattern, could achieve state-of-the-art FR results in large-scale face databases such as FERET and FRGC. However, the time and space complexity of Gabor transformation are too high for many practical FR applications. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient local feature extraction scheme, namely monogenic binary coding (MBC), for face representation and recognition. Monogenic signal representation decomposes an original signal into three complementary components: amplitude, orientation, and phase. We encode the monogenic variation in each local region and monogenic feature in each pixel, and then calculate the statistical features (e.g., histogram) of the extracted local features. The local statistical features extracted from the complementary monogenic components (i.e., amplitude, orientation, and phase) are then fused for effective FR. It is shown that the proposed MBC scheme has significantly lower time and space complexity than the Gabor-transformation-based local feature methods. The extensive FR experiments on four large-scale databases demonstrated the effectiveness of MBC, whose performance is competitive with and even better than state-of-the-art local-feature-based FR methods.