Gabor Wavelet Associative Memory for Face Recognition

This letter describes a high-performance face recognition system by combining two recently proposed neural network models, namely Gabor wavelet network (GWN) and kernel associative memory (KAM), into a unified structure called Gabor wavelet associative memory (GWAM). GWAM has superior representation capability inherited from GWN and consequently demonstrates a much better recognition performance than KAM. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate a GWAM-based recognition scheme using three popular face databases, i.e., FERET database, Olivetti-Oracle Research Lab (ORL) database and AR face database. The experimental results consistently show our scheme's superiority and demonstrate its very high-performance comparing favorably to some recent face recognition methods, achieving 99.3% and 100% accuracy, respectively, on the former two databases, exhibiting very robust performance on the last database against varying illumination conditions.