Journal of Applied Computer Science & Mathematics, no.

12 (6) /2012, Suceava

49


Enhanced SVD Based Face Recognition

1
Muhammad SHARIF,
2
Saad ANIS,
3
Mudassar RAZA,
4
Sajjad MOHSIN
Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology
Wah Cantt., 47040, Pakistan
1
muhammadsharifmalik@yahoo.com,
2
saad_ksm@yahoo.com,
3
mudassarkazmi@yahoo.com,
4
smohsin@comsats.edu.pk

Abstract-One of the demanding tasks in face recognition is to
handle illumination and expression variations. A lot of research
is in progress to overcome such problems. This paper addresses
the preprocessing method that is composed of grouping SVD
perturbation and DWT. The proposed technique also performs
well under one picture per person scenarios. The resulting
image of this method is fed in to the simple SVD algorithm for
face recognition. This paper performs its accuracy test on ORL,
Yale, PIE and AR databases and focuses on the illumination
problems.

Keywords: Eigen face, Singular value decomposition (SVD),

Discrete wavelet transforms (DWT), SVD perturbation.
I INTRODUCTION
Face identification is a constructive research fields in
image processing. Due to its wide range of applications in
real (everyday) life, it gains more importance among the
researchers. A number of face recognition techniques are
available which can be classified into geometric feature and
template based techniques [2].
First category makes use of local facial appearance
portions such as eyes, nose, mouth and the distance between
these features. Elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) [3] is
the most widely used technique in this category whereas; the
second category uses the whole face as input for recognition.
The most basic technique for this category is Eigen face [4]
which projects a high dimensional face space into lower
dimensional Eigen face subspace.
SVD [5] is a projection based recognition technique. It
requires less space and is also an efficient approach than
Eigen face. A comprehensive study on available face
recognition techniques can be made at Zhao et al [6]. But the
performance of these algorithms decreases under varying
illumination conditions and expressions.
One sample per individual problem has also gained much
importance in the recent era which is a great challenge for
researchers. Zhi-Hua et al [6] defines the one sample
problem for one image of a person; the purpose is to classify
an individual from the database by using the single pose of
any person and identifying the similar person.
According to Zhang et. al. [7], the performance of PCA,
2DPCA [8] and many other face recognition techniques
degrades when only one image is available as a training
sample. They also provide a detailed survey on the
techniques available that address the one sample problem
[17].
This paper focuses on the preprocessing stage for face
recognition so that useless information can be removed from
face and the feature extraction stage with useful information
can be provided to work further. For a very reason, this paper
first makes use of SVD perturbation, then applies discrete
wavelet transforms on face images and finally, uses these
images as input to FR algorithm named as SVD based
projection for face recognition [18].
II RELATED WORK
Much of the work has been done to cope with the
challenges of small sample size. Most of these techniques are
focused on the preprocessing stage.
In (PC)2A, Wu and Zhou et al [9] addressed the one
sample problem and enhanced the simple PCA by enriching
the important information on face. Their work is to find out
the first order projection (horizontal and vertical) of face and
combine it with the original face image to get a more
enhanced image. After that, they applied PCA on this
enhanced image [6]. Zhi-Hua and Zang et al [10] presented
an enhanced version of (PC) 2A named E (PC) 2A [19].
Eigen hills [11] is another preprocessing technique that
is based on applying Eigen face method on the extracted
edges. This method cannot perform well under varying
expressions because edges are more sensitive to the
expression variations [12].
Songcan Chen et al [1] developed SVD perturbation
method to address the single sample image for a person. The
concept behind this is to derive a new enhanced image by
increasing the singular values of original face image.
Derived images are also treated as independent images to
make the one sample database a normal sample size
database. Finally, the PCA is applied on both (original and
derived) face images.
Wavelet transforms are now widely used to handle such
variations. GangYan et al [13] presented a characteristics
selection method that is based upon the combination of
discrete wavelet and discrete cosine transform. Y.Z.Goh et al
[14] devised a method to remove illumination effect from the
face image by using discrete wavelet transforms. The main
idea behind this is to set the coefficients of low frequency

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50
component to zero which makes the system invariant to
illumination.
Dimension reduction is also an area of concern. One
purpose of conventional methods such as PCA and 2DPCA
is to reduce the dimension of face space. Gang Yan et al.
[10] presented a method that is based on the combination of
Discrete Wavelet Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform.
This combination is used to find features of face images. The
use of DCT reduces the dimension of the original face image
and retains only the useful information in feature subspace.
The SVM [11] is then used to categorize these feature
vectors.
III PROPOSED TECHNIQUE
This paper has two main objectives to fulfill. The first one
is to cope up with the varying illuminations and expressions.
The second intention is to provide an answer for one sample
dilemma. This paper presents a preprocessing technique that
has three steps. In the first step, the histogram equalization is
applied to the face image, so that large intensity variations
can be handled to some extent at this step. In the second step,
the paper makes use of singular value decomposition (SVD)
perturbation, which at first, applies the SVD decomposition
on face image (I).
| | ( ) , , L D R svd I = (1)
Here L and R are left and right odd vectors respectively, D
is the diagonal matrix of particular values.
SVD perturbation uses these singular values to make the
derived image (J).

i
J L D R = - - (2)
where i varies between 1 and 2. Finally the derived image
is combined with the original image.

( )
1
a J
C
a
I + -
=
+
(3)
where a is the combination parameter and it varies from 0
to 1.
The second step fades out the unimportant information
from the face image and the salient features of face become
richer. Output of this step is shown in Figure 4. Individually,
this step is not able to perform well under varying
conditions. So finally, this paper makes use of wavelet
transforms to handle those variations. Wavelet transforms
decompose a face image into a number of coefficients that
represent an image into different frequency sub bands.
In the third step, the technique applies discrete wavelet
transforms (DWT) on the processed image of second step.
Two dimensional discrete wavelet transforms decompose an
image into the approximation and detailed coefficients
(horizontal, vertical and diagonal) as shown in figure1.

Fig1. Flow diagram of 2D-DWT

Approximation variables are the low frequency
components (LL) and detail variables are high frequency
components and are represented as LH, HL, and HH.

LL1=[Lc*[Lr*I
(x,y)
]
21
]
12

LH1=[Hc*[Lr*I
(x,y)
]
21
]
12

HL1=[Lc*[Hr*I
(x,y)
]
21
]
12

HH1=[Hc*[Hr*I(x,y)]21]12

where L is the low pass filter and H is the high pass filter.
I is an original image.
Low frequency component contains the useful information
that is helpful in recognition process. Also, unimportant
information gets lost in this component, by which
recognition stage can fully focus on important features. The
(LL) component is ineffective with illumination changes and
expression variations. So this technique takes an advantage
of this fact and uses these low frequency components as
input images to the recognition algorithm. Finally, the
approximation coefficient is used as an input to the SVD
based projection for face recognition, where the mean image
is calculated by using preprocessed images as:


1
1
M
M
i
i
=
X

(4)

and then feature vectors are computed using SVD. The
proposed method computes performance experiment using
the orthogonal haar wavelet function as a mother wavelet.
The system decomposes an image up to level 1 as shown in
figure 5.
Many researchers used level2 decomposition but the idea
behind level1 decomposition is that it restrains enough
energy or information that is useful for recognition. As
decomposition goes deeper (level2, level3), valuable
information gets lost form face image that really degrades
the recognition ratio.
Another benefit of using wavelet transform is the
dimension reduction. When DWT level1 decomposition is
applied on an image, it returns the coefficients of half size of
original image. Therefore, with reduced image vectors,
computational complexity also gets reduced. The proposed
system shows great success under one sample problem and
varying conditions.
The block diagram of proposed algorithm is shown in
figure 2.

Journal of Applied Computer Science & Mathematics, no. 12 (6) /2012, Suceava

51

Fig.2. Working and functionality of the proposed system
IV EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
ORL, Yale, PIE and AR face datasets are used to test the
proposed method. ORL consists of 400 images of 40
personals (10 images of per person of size 112 x 92). The
database contains the images with different illuminations,
expressions and poses. Sample images of ORL database are
shown in figure 3. Here in this paper two experimental ways
are used to compute the result; first for varying conditions in
which five images per individual were chosen as a training
and the remaining five images were chosen for testing as
shown in figure 3. See Table I for Results.
The second experimental way is used for one sample
problem in which first image per person is selected for
training and remaining for testing purpose. This procedure is
repeated 50 times. See Table II for Results..
In experimental results proposed method uses the
parameters i=3/4 in equation 2 and alpha = 0.25 in equation
3. Processed image is shown in figure 4.
Proposed system includes grey level equalization,
removing effect of illuminations and expression variations
and also reducing the dimension of original images with the
help of using the combination of SVD perturbation and
discrete wavelet transforms. The recognition accuracy of the
technique is compared with previous proposed systems like
PCA and SVD for the first way and with PCA, (PC) 2A,
SVD and SVD perturbation for second way of experiment.
The proposed system shows better accuracy/recognition rate
than the existing techniques as shown in figure 6. In table I
top1 matched rate is mentioned with 10 Eigen faces used for
PCA. The recognition rates of different techniques for one
image per person are shown in table II, where the proposed
system shows higher accuracy as shown in figure 7.
Table III computes the accuracy of the proposed method
on Yale face dataset composed of 165 images.

(a)

(b)
Fig.3. Face images from ORL database. (a)Training Images (b) Testing
Images.

(a) (b) (c)
Fig.4. SVD perturbation (a) Original image (b) Derived image (c) Combined
image


a) (b) (c) (d)
Fig5. (a) LL1 (b) LH1 (c) HL1 (d) HH1

TABLE I Recognition rate on ORL database with 5 images per person

Image No PCA SVD ESVD
2 72 80 83
3 80 82 86
4 81 88 91
5 86 91 95

Fig 6. Comparison chart with varying no. of images

TABLE II Recognition rate with one image per person on ORL dataset
Method Recognition ratio
PCA 60
(PC)
2
A 62
SVD Perturbation 62
SVD 67
ESVD 72

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Fig7. Comparison chart with one sample image where ptb is perturbation

TABLE III The results on the Yale face datasets

Methods Accuracy
PCA 71.56% (119/165)
2DPCA 84.24% (139/165)
Enhanced (SVD) (Proposed) 90.30% (149/165)
(PC)2 A 69.70% (115/165)

The table shows the accuracy of different facial
recognition methods with the proposed enhanced support
vector machine, 2DPCA and PCA.
Table IV shows the accuracy of different facial
recognition methods along with the proposed method
enhanced (SVD). Similarly figure 9 shows the accuracy
result of proposed method in graphical form.


Fig8. The results on the Yale face datasets

The PIE facial database comprises of 68 images and a total
of 41,368 images from different angles [15].

TABLE IV The results on the PIE face datasets with Comparison of
Eigenfaces, Fisher faces, Laplacian faces and proposed method enhanced
(SVD).
Methods Accuracy
Eigen Faces 80.66% (121/150)
Fisher Faces 94.60% (142/150)
Laplacian Faces 95.33% (143/150)
Enhanced (SVD)
(Proposed)
96.00% (144/150)

Fig9. The results on the PIE face datasets

The images of this database were captured by

synchronized cameras from 13 different directions under
varying expression, illumination and pose variation. This
paper uses 150 images of each individual, 50 for training and
100 for testing the accuracy percentage.
The AR face data base was collected at Purdue University
with a total of 4,000 images of 126 persons (70 men, 56
women) [16].
Table V provides recognition accuracy percentage of AR
dataset on 1000 frontal face images out of which 100 were
used at training side (60 men and 40 women) and 900 on
testing side of the algorithm. Images were cropped as frontal
faces with variation in facial expressions, pose variation and
illumination conditions. Similarly in figure 10 the error
percentage per each method and proposed method is shown
where the proposed method has very low percentage of error.
V CONCLUSION
Enhanced SVD idea focuses on preprocessing stage of
facial recognition. Hence, the paper focused on to remove
the challenge of illumination and expression variations by
the combination of SVD perturbation and discrete wavelet
transforms. This paper identifies the low frequency
component as the input image to recognition algorithm that
is invariant to these challenges. Finally, the use of wavelet
transforms on the input images reduces the calculation
complexity. It also reduces the size of original image.

TABLE V The results of AR face datasets with comparison of Eigenfaces,

Projection, B-2DPCA, ILLFR (DCT) in LRD FR-using (LBD) and
Proposed method enhanced (SVD).
Methods Accuracy Error
Percentage
Eigen Faces 74.44% 25.56%
Projection (PC)2A 77.78% 22.22%
B-2DPCA 86.11% 13.89%
ILLFR(DCT) in LRD 90.55% 09.45%
FR-using(LBD) 94.44% 05.56%
Enhanced(SVD)
(Proposed)
95.00% 05.00%


Journal of Applied Computer Science & Mathematics, no. 12 (6) /2012, Suceava

53

Fig.10. The results of AR face datasets

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Mr. Muhammad Sharif is working as an Assistant Professor in department of computer science, COMSATS Institute of
Information Technology, Wah Campus and having over 17 years of experience of teaching graduate and under graduate
classes. His areas of research are Image Processing and Computer Networks.

Mr. Saad Anis is a graduate from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Wah Campus. He is working as
Professional Data Warehouse Consultant in Teradata GCC Pakistan

Mr. Mudassar Raza is working as a lecturer in department of computer science, COMSATS Institute of Information
Technology, Wah Campus and having over 5 years of experience of teaching under graduate classes. His area of research is
Image Processing.

Dr. Sajjad Mohsin is working as a Professor/Dean, Faculty of Information Sciences and Technology, COMSATS Institute
of Information Technology. He is the member of editorial boards of 3 International Journals including IEEE Journal as well.
He is also member of Board of Faculties and Convener Board of Studies of Computer Science.