• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.295-302
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• 2018

Face recognition (FR) has been widely used in various applications, such as smart surveillance systems, immigration control in airports, user authentication in smart devices, and so on. FR in well-controlled conditions has been extensively studied and is relatively mature. However, in unconstrained conditions, FR performance could degrade due to undesired characteristics of the input face image (such as irregular facial pose variations). To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a new method for determining if an input image is suitable for FR. In the proposed method, for an input face image, reconstruction error is computed by using a predefined set of reference face images. Then, suitability can be determined by comparing the reconstruction error with a threshold value. In order to reduce the effect of illumination changes on the determination of suitability, a preprocessing algorithm is applied to the input and reference face images before the reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to accurately discriminate non-frontal and/or incorrectly aligned face images from correctly aligned frontal face images. In addition, only 3 ms is required to process a face image of $64{\times}64$ pixels, which further demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method.