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Are Gabor phases really useless for face recognition?

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Abstract

Gabor features have been recognized as one of the best representations for face recognition. Usually, only the magnitudes of the Gabor coefficients are thought of as being useful for face recognition, while the phases of the Gabor features are deemed to be useless and thus usually ignored by face recognition researchers. However, in this paper, our findings show that the latter should be reconsidered. By encoding Gabor phases through local binary patterns and local histograms, we have achieved very impressive recognition results, which are comparable to those of Gabor magnitudes-based methods. The results of our experiments also indicate that, by combining the phases with the magnitudes, higher accuracy can be achieved. Such observations suggest that more attention should be paid to the Gabor phases for face recognition.

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Acknowledgments

This research is partially sponsored by the Natural Science Foundation of China under contract nos. 60332010, 60673091, and 60772071, “100 Talents Program” of CAS, Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (nos. 2006AA01Z122 and 2007AA01Z163), and ISVISION Technologies Co., Ltd.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150006, People’s Republic of China

    Wenchao Zhang & Wen Gao

  2. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen & Wen Gao

  3. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Wenchao Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen & Wen Gao

  4. Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, People’s Republic of China

    Laiyun Qing

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  1. Wenchao Zhang
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  2. Shiguang Shan
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  3. Laiyun Qing
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  4. Xilin Chen
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  5. Wen Gao
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Correspondence to Shiguang Shan.

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Zhang, W., Shan, S., Qing, L. et al. Are Gabor phases really useless for face recognition?. Pattern Anal Applic 12, 301–307 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-008-0123-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-008-0123-0

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