K-Medoids Clustering Using Partitioning Around Medoids for Performing Face Recognition

Face recognition is one of the most unobtrusive biometric techniques that can be used for access control as well as surveillance purposes. Various methods for implementing face recognition have been proposed with varying degrees of performance in different scenarios. The most common issue with effective facial biometric systems is high susceptibility of variations in the face owing to different factors like changes in pose, varying illumination, different expression, presence of outliers, noise etc. This paper explores a novel technique for face recognition by performing classification of the face images using unsupervised learning approach through K-Medoids clustering. Partitioning Around Medoids algorithm (PAM) has been used for performing K-Medoids clustering of the data. The results are suggestive of increased robustness to noise and outliers in comparison to other clustering methods. Therefore the technique can also be used to increase the overall robustness of a face recognition system and thereby increase its invariance and make it a reliably usable biometric modality.