Human face profile recognition by a P-Fourier descriptor

A method of recognizing human face profiles is proposed. Most conventional methods of recognizing human face profiles use fiducial marks, length of the line connecting the marks, angles between fiducial points, and other measures of profile outlines as the components of characteristic vectors. The P-Fourier descriptor developed by Uesaka can describe open curves fairly well, and it has many features of curves in the low-frequency range. We use the P-Fourier descriptor as a characteristic vector of a human face profile. We show that the P-Fourier coefficients in the low-frequency range are useful for human face profile recognition, that is, by using 31 P-Fourier coefficients, we obtained a correct recognition rate of 93.1 % for 130 subjects.