Recognizing Expression Variant and Occluded Face Images Based on Nested HMM and Fuzzy Rule Based Approach

Abstract

The face recognition with expression and occlusion variation becomes the greatest challenge in biometric applications to recognize people. The proposed work concentrates on recognizing occlusion and seven kinds of expression variations such as neutral, surprise, happy, sad, fear, disgust and angry. During enrollment process, principle component analysis (PCA) detects facial regions on the input image. The detected facial region is converted into fuzzy domain data to make decision during recognition process. The Haar wavelet transform extracts features from the detected facial regions. The Nested Hidden markov model is employed to train these features and each feature of face image is considered as states in a Markov chain to perform learning among the features. The maximum likelihood for the input image was estimated by using Baum Welch algorithm and these features were kept on database. During recognition process, the expression and occlusion varied face image is taken as the test image and maximum likelihood for test image is found by following same procedure done in enrollment process. The matching score between maximum likelihood of input image and test image is computed and it is utilized by fuzzy rule based method to decide whether the test image belongs to authorized or unauthorized. The proposed work was tested among several expression varied and occluded face images of JAFFE and AR datasets respectively.