Recent Advances in Face Recognition

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, much progress has been made in still image based recognition, accompanied by meticulous performance evaluation of many state-of-the art algorithms. It is widely believed that the face recognition problem has been solved for frontal images acquired in controlled illumination conditions. However, when variations due to pose, illumination and aging are present, the performance of many existing algorithms is not good enough for deployment. In this talk, I will discuss three new algorithms for pose and illumination invariant face recognition using still images. These algorithms are derived using generalized photometric stereo, albedo estimation using a non-stationary Wiener filter and pose encoded spherical harmonics. I will then discuss model-based approaches for face recognition across aging in children and adults. Finally, I will discuss the video-based face recognition problem and present two algorithms, one based on the particle filter and the other based on statistical inference on manifolds. The talk will conclude with suggestions for future research directions in this area.

Speaker Biography

Rama Chellappa is the Minta Martin Professor of Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, where he is the Director of the Center for Automation Research. Over the past 26 years, he has published numerous highly-cited papers and has authored many books in visual surveillance, biometrics, MRFs and image processing. His current research interests are in face and gait analysis, 3D modeling from video, surveillance and monitoring, hyperspectral processing, and computer vision. He has served as the associate editor of four IEEE Transactions and as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He served as a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Board of Governors and as its Vice President of Awards and Membership. He has also served as General and Technical Program Chair/Co-Chair for several IEEE international, national conferences and workshops.

Prof. Chellappa has received several awards, including an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, three IBM Faculty Development Awards, an Excellence in Teaching Award and the Technical Achievement Award (2000) and the Meritorious Service Award (2007) from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has also received the Outstanding Innovator Award from the Office of Technology Commercialization, the A.J. Clark School Engineering Faculty Outstanding Research Award, the Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow Award and the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award at U. Maryland. He co-authored two papers that received Best Paper Awards from the International Conference on Pattern Recognition. He is a Fellow of IEEE and the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He is a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society and also received its Meritorious Service Award.