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Face recognition: A convolutional neural network approach


Author(s) : Andrew D. Back Ah Chung Tsoi Steve Lawrence, 
Publisher : N/A
Publication Date : 1997
ISSN : N/A
Abstract : Faces represent complex, multidimensional, meaningful visual stimuli and developing a computational model for face recognition is difficult [43]. We present a hybrid neural network solution which compares favorably with other methods. The system combines local image sampling, a self-organizing map neural network, and a convolutional neural network. The self-organizing map provides a quantization of the image samples into a topological space where inputs that are nearby in the original space are also nearby in the output space, thereby providing dimensionality reduction and invariance to minor changes in the image sample, and the convolutional neural network provides for partial invariance to translation, rotation, scale, and deformation. The convolutional network extracts successively larger features in a hierarchical set of layers. We present results using the Karhunen-Loeve transform in place of the self-organizing map, and a multi-layer perceptron in place of the convolutional network. The Karhunen-Loeve transform performs almost as well (5.3 % error versus 3.8%). The multi-layer perceptron performs very poorly (40 % error versus 3.8%). The method is capable of rapid classification, requires only fast, approximate normalization and preprocessing, and consistently exhibits better classification performance than the eigenfaces approach [43] on the database considered as the number of,