Histogram of Gabor phase patterns (HGPP): a novel object representation approach for face recognition

A novel object descriptor, histogram of Gabor phase pattern (HGPP), is proposed for robust face recognition. In HGPP, the quadrant-bit codes are first extracted from faces based on the Gabor transformation. Global Gabor phase pattern (GGPP) and local Gabor phase pattern (LGPP) are then proposed to encode the phase variations. GGPP captures the variations derived from the orientation changing of Gabor wavelet at a given scale (frequency), while LGPP encodes the local neighborhood variations by using a novel local XOR pattern (LXP) operator. They are both divided into the nonoverlapping rectangular regions, from which spatial histograms are extracted and concatenated into an extended histogram feature to represent the original image. Finally, the recognition is performed by using the nearest-neighbor classifier with histogram intersection as the similarity measurement. The features of HGPP lie in two aspects: 1) HGPP can describe the general face images robustly without the training procedure; 2) HGPP encodes the Gabor phase information, while most previous face recognition methods exploit the Gabor magnitude information. In addition, Fisher separation criterion is further used to improve the performance of HGPP by weighing the subregions of the image according to their discriminative powers. The proposed methods are successfully applied to face recognition, and the experiment results on the large-scale FERET and CAS-PEAL databases show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform other well-known systems in terms of recognition rate.