This system is deployed at a seminar room. Four cameras are mounted at the corners of the room. Identification is done using video-streams acquired from these four cameras.
A Robust Face Recognition Algorithm for Real-World Applications
We developed a local appearance-based face recognition algorithm using discrete cosine transform, which is a generic, robust, and fast face recognition algorithm that has been deployed for several real-world person identification applications. The proposed face recognition approach divides the input face image into local blocks and processes each local block using discrete cosine transform. The local representation provides robustness against appearance variations in local regions caused by factors such as facial occlusion or expression, whereas utilizing frequency information provides robustness against changes in illumination. The algorithm has been extensively tested both using standard benchmark databases —AR, CMU PIE, FRGC, Yale B, Extended Yale B— and using the data collected from real-world applications —person identification in smart rooms, entrance monitoring, visitor interface, person re-identification in TV series—. The experimental results show that, the algorithm can successfully handle facial appearance variations caused by uncontrolled recording conditions, expression, occlusion, and illumination. Moreover, the systems based on this algorithm have been found to work reliably under real-world conditions.
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Generic versus Salient Region-based Partitioning for Local Appearance Face Recognition | Intl. Conf. on Biometrics (ICB’09), LNCS, Vol. 5558, pp. 367-375, Alghero, Italy, June 2009. |
H. Gao, H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Pose Normalization for Local Appearance-Based Face Recognition | Intl. Conf. on Biometrics (ICB’09), LNCS, Vol. 5558, pp. 32-41, Alghero, Italy, June 2009. |
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Why is Facial Occlusion a Challenging Problem? | Intl. Conf. on Biometrics (ICB’09), LNCS, Vol. 5558, pp. 299-308, Alghero, Italy, June 2009. |
H. Gao, H.K. Ekenel, M. Fischer, R. Stiefelhagen |
Multi-resolution Local Appearance-based Face Verification | In Proc. of Intl. Conf. on Pattern Recognition (ICPR’10), Istanbul, Turkey, August 2010. |
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Automatic Frequency Band Selection for Illumination Robust Face Recognition | In Proc. of Intl. Conf. on Pattern Recognition (ICPR’10), Istanbul, Turkey, August 2010. |
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Face Alignment by Minimizing the Closest Classification Distance | In Proc. of Intl. Conf. on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS’09), Washington DC, USA, September 2009. |
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Analysis of Local Appearance-based Face Recognition: Effects of Feature Selection and Feature Normalization | In Proc. of CVPR Biometrics Workshop, New York, USA, June 2006. |
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Block Selection in the Local Appearance-based Face Recognition Scheme | In Proc. of CVPR Biometrics Workshop, New York, USA, June 2006. |
H.K.Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Local Appearance based Face Recognition Using Discrete Cosine Transform | In Proc. of 13th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2005), Antalya, Turkey, September 2005. |
| Author | Title | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Hazım Kemal Ekenel | A Robust Face Recognition Algorithm for Real-World Applications | 2009/02 |
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
K. Bernardin, H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Multimodal identity tracking in a smart room. | Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 13(1): 25-31, 2009. |
A. Pnevmatikakis, H.K. Ekenel, C. Barras, J. Hernando |
Multimodal Person Identification | Book Chapter in 'Computers in the Human Interaction Loop', Human-Computer Interaction Series, Springer Verlag, London, 2009. |
R. Stiefelhagen, K. Bernardin, H.K. Ekenel, M. Voit |
Tracking Identities and Attention in Smart Environments - Contributions and Progress in the CHIL Project | In Proc. of 8th IEEE Int. Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2008. |
H.K. Ekenel, J. Stallkamp, H. Gao, M. Fischer, R. Stiefelhagen |
Face Recognition for Smart Interactions | In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, pp. 1007-1010, Beijing, China, July 2007. |
H.K. Ekenel, M. Fischer, R. Stiefelhagen |
Face Recognition in Smart Rooms | Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, LNCS, Vol. 4892, pp. 120-131, Brno, Czech Republic, June 2007. |
H.K. Ekenel, M. Fischer, Q. Jin, R. Stiefelhagen |
Multi-modal Person Identification in a Smart Environment | In Proc. of CVPR Biometrics Workshop, Minneapolis, USA, June 2007. |
H.K. Ekenel, Q. Jin, M. Fischer, R. Stiefelhagen |
ISL Person Identification Systems in CLEAR 2007 | CLEAR Evaluation Workshop, LNCS, Vol. 4625, pp. 256-265, Baltimore, US, May 2007. |
R. Stiefelhagen, K. Bernardin, H.K. Ekenel, J. McDonough, K. Nickel, M. Voit, M. Wölfel |
Audio-Visual Perception of a Lecturer in a Smart Seminar Room | Signal Processing, Vol. 86 (12), Dec. 2006. |
H.K. Ekenel, A. Pnevmatikakis |
Video-Based Face Recognition Evaluation in the CHIL Project – Run 1 | In Proc of 7th International Conference Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG2006), Southampton, UK, April 2006. |
H.K. Ekenel, Q. Jin |
ISL Person Identification Systems in the CLEAR Evaluations | CLEAR Evaluation Workshop, LNCS, Vol. 4122, pp. 249-257, Southampton, UK, April 2006. |
Recognizing Individuals Entering a Room
The system is deployed at the entrance door of a seminar room. The camera is located opposite the door at a distance of six meters. Individuals are recognized automatically when they enter the room.
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
H.K. Ekenel, J. Stallkamp, R. Stiefelhagen |
A Video-based Door Monitoring System Using Local Appearance-based Face Models | Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Vol. 114, No. 5, pp. 596 – 608, May 2010. |
J. Stallkamp, H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Video-based Face Recognition on Real-World Data | In Proc. of International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'07), pp. 1-8, Rio de Jenario, Brasil, October 2007. |
H.K. Ekenel, J. Stallkamp, H. Gao, M. Fischer, R. Stiefelhagen |
Face Recognition for Smart Interactions | In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, pp. 1007-1010, Beijing, China, July 2007. |
H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
An Un-awarely Collected Real World Face Database: The ISL-Door Face Database | In Proc. of International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2007, Bielefeld, Germany, March 2007. |
Face Recognition for Humanoid Robots
The system is deployed on a robot and uses a stereo camera for image acquisition. It identifies the person interacting with the robot.
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
H. Holzapfel, T. Schaaf, H.K. Ekenel, C. Shaa, A. Waibel |
A Robot Learns to Know People - First Contacts of a Robot | In Proc. of 29th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI2006), Bremen, Germany, June 2006. |
K. Nickel, H.K. Ekenel, M. Voit, R. Stiefelhagen |
Audio-Visual Perception of Humans for a Humanoid Robot | In Proc. of 2nd Intl. Workshop on Human-Centered Robotics Systems, Munich, October 2006. |
S. Könn, H. Holzapfel, H.K. Ekenel, A. Waibel |
Integrating Face-ID into an Interactive Person-ID Learning System | In Proc. of International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2007, Bielefeld, Germany, March 2007. |
R. Stiefelhagen, H.K. Ekenel, C. Fügen, P. Gieselmann, H. Holzapfel, F. Kraft, K. Nickel, M. Voit, A. Waibel |
Enabling Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction for the Karlsruhe Humanoid Robot | IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Special Issue on Human-Robot Interaction, Vol. 23, No. 5, October 2007. |
3D Face Recognition
In the system, 3D point clouds are registered to provide dense correspondence between faces. Depth images are constructed from the corresponding well-registered point clouds. The system utilizes depth map images to extract local features and performs identification using local appearance-based face recognition.
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
H. K. Ekenel, H. Gao, R. Stiefelhagen |
3-D Face Recognition using Local Appearance-Based Models | IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 630-635, September 2007. |
Open-set Face Recognition
In the system, faces are automatically detected and registered. The local appearance-based face recognition method is utilized for representing the faces. An identity verification component is trained for every known subject in the database. Open-set identification is performed via a series of verification processes.
The system has been developed as a visitor interface, where a visitor looks at the monitor before knocking on the door. A welcome message is displayed on the screen. While the visitor is looking at the welcome message, the system identifies the visitor unobtrusively without needing person’s cooperation. According to the identity of the person, the system customizes the information that it conveys about the host.
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
H.K. Ekenel, L. Szasz-Toth, R. Stiefelhagen |
Open-set face recognition-based Visitor Interface System | 7thIntl. Conf. on Computer Vision Systems, LNCS, Vol. 5815, pp. 43-52, Liege, Belgium, October 2009. |
Identity-based Interactive Video Retrieval
The system automatically detects and tracks persons in video sequences of TV series, and extracts features from these tracks which can be used to reliably identify the persons in the video.
In the application, the user selects a person from a scene and the system returns scenes in the video that contain the same person. The user can refine the search interactively.
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
M. Fischer, H.K. Ekenel, R. Stiefelhagen |
Interactive person re-identification in TV series | In Proc. of Intl. Workshop on Content-based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI’10), Grenoble, France, June 2010. |
Driver Identification in Smart Cars
 |
| (Source: flickr.com) |
| Author | Title | Source |
|---|---|---|
J. Stallkamp, H.K. Ekenel, H. Erdogan, R. Stiefelhagen, A. Ercil |
Video-Based Driver Identification Using Local Appearance Face Recognition | Workshop on DSP in Mobile and Vehicular Systems, Istanbul, Turkey, June 2007. |
H. Erdogan, A. Ercil, H.K. Ekenel, S.Y. Bilgin, I. Eden, M. Kirisci |
Multimodel Person Recognition for Vehicular Applications | 6th International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems (MCS 2005), LNCS, Vol. 3541, pp. 366–375, California, USA, June 2005. |