
FANG AND LI: FACE RECOGNITION BY EXPLOITING LOCAL GABOR FEATURES WITH MASR 2607
Fig. 1. Gabor wavelet with five scales and eight orientations.
sample y based on the minimum representation error
criteria
ˆc = SRC(y) = arg min
c
y −ˆy
c
2
= arg min
c
y − A
c
(ˆx)
2
(7)
where
c
(
ˆ
X) is an vector operator that preserves
coefficients of ˆx corresponding to class c and sets all
other coefficients to zero.
B. Gabor Wavelet
Gabor wavelet filters are defined as follows [10]:
ψ
o,s
(z) =
k
o,s
2
σ
2
· exp
−k
o,s
2
z
2
/2σ
2
·[exp(ik
o,s
z) − exp(−σ
2
/2)] (8)
where o and s separately represent the orientation and scale
of the Gabor filters, z = (x, y) denotes the pixel, and σ is the
ratio of the Gaussian window width to wavelength. The wave
vector k
o,s
is defined as
k
o,s
= k
s
· exp(iφ
o
) (9)
where k
s
= k
max
/ f
s
and φ
o
= (π · o)/8. k
max
is the maximum
frequency and f
s
is the spacing factor between kernels in the
frequency domain.
Gabor wavelet can have a number of different types by
altering the scale S and orientation O.Fig.1showsthe
Gabor wavelets with five scales and eight orientations. As can
be observed, the Gabor wavelet reflects various kinds of edge
and bar details with different orientations and takes abundant
frequency information with different scales. Therefore, the
Gabor wavelet can extract more details in some meaningful
local regions of face (e.g., nose, eyes, and mouth), which are
very useful for recognition. The convolution of an input face
image with the Gabor wavelet creates O× S magnitude images
and O × S phase images. Since the magnitude information
contains the variation of local energy, this paper only selects
magnitude images as the Gabor features. In addition, to more
effectively utilize the Gabor local information [8], [13], [14],
we will partition the feature image into a set of local
regions.
III. P
ROPOSED METHOD FOR LOCAL
GABOR-FEATURE-BASED FACE RECOGNITION
A. Multitask Sparse Representation Model for Gabor Features
Suppose we have a training dictionary A and a test
sample y, as described aforementioned, the Gabor wavelet can
generate O × S feature dictionaries {A
1
,...,A
O×S
} and test
samples {y
1
,...,y
O×S
} of different orientations and scales.
We arrange all test samples and atoms of training dictionaries
into column vectors and denote their sparse coefficients as a
matrix M =[x
1
,...,x
O×S
]∈R
N×(O×S)
,whereN stands for
the dimension of each sparse coefficient (corresponding to the
number of atoms in the dictionary A). The sparse matrix can
also be represented as row vectors M =[x
1
; ...; x
j
; ...; x
P
],
where x
j
is one row of the matrix M. Note that, for simplicity,
we here only utilize the whole image as the feature. In the later
section, we will discuss how to partition the image into regions
and utilize the SRW strategy to fuse the result of each region.
After Gabor multiscale-orientation dictionaries
{A
1
,...,A
O×S
} and test samples {y
1
,...,y
O×S
} are
obtained, we aim to utilize the information from different
scales and orientations to make a single decision for the
recognition. Based on the SRC model, one simple way
is to rewrite (3) into a multitask sparse representation
problem (Fig. 2)
{ˆx
i
}
O×S
i=1
= arg min
{x
i
}
o×s
i=1
y
i
−A
i
x
i
2
s.t. x
i
0
≤ K ∀1 ≤ i ≤ (O × S). (10)
However, this formulation separately pursuits the sparse
coefficient ˆx
i
for each task and thus does not consider the
relationship among the different tasks (orientations and scales).
To combine the information among the Gabor orientations
and scales, we can use a joint sparse assumption [34], [35]
that the sparse coefficients of different tasks have the same
sparse pattern. That is, for different tasks, the positions of the
nonzero coefficients in all the sparse vectors x
1
,...,x
O×S
are identical, while coefficient values might be varied. Under
this assumption, the nonzero coefficients in M should be on
the same rows and a joint sparse regularization
row,0
can be
placed on the M to select a small number of the representative
nonzero rows
M
row,0
=[x
1
2
; ...;x
j
2
; ...;x
P
2
]
0
(11)
where x
j
is one row in the sparse coefficient matrix M.
Then (10) can be rewritten as
ˆ
M = arg min
{M}
O×S
i=1
y
i
−A
i
x
i
2
s.t. M
row,0
≤ K. (12)
In [34] and [35], the application of the joint sparse prior for
multitask problem is termed as the MJSR model.
B. Multitask Adaptive Sparse Representation
The MJSR model explained above can be directly used to
exploit the Gabor information of different scales and orien-
tations by enforcing the same sparsity pattern among them.