Facial feature processing using artificial neural networks
Nicholas David Porter · Warwick Research Archive Portal (University of Warwick) · 1998
Describing a human face is a natural ability used in eveyday life. To the police, a witness description of a suspect is key evidence in the identification of the suspect. However, the process of examining "mug shots" to find a match to the description is tedious and often unfruitful. If a description could be stored with each photograph and used as a searchable index, this would provide a much more effective means of using "mug shots" for identification purposes. A set of descriptive measures have been defined by Shepherd [73] which seek to describe faces in a manner that may be used for just this purpose. This work investigates methods of automatically determining these descriptive measures from digitised images. Analysis is performed on the images to establish the potential for distinguishing between different categories in these descriptions. This reveals that while some of the classifications are relatively linear, others are very non-linear. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), being often used as non-linear classifiers, are considered as a means of automatically performing the classification of the images. As a comparison, simple linear classifiers are also applied to the same problems.