An a-contrario approach for face matching

Abstract

In this work we focus on the matching stage of a face recognition system. These systems are used to identify an unknown person or to validate a claimed identity. In the face recognition field it is very common to innovate in the extracted features of a face and use a simple threshold on the distance between samples in order to perform the validation of a claimed identity. In this work we present a novel strategy based in the a-contrario framework in order to improve the matching stage. This approach results in a validation threshold that is automatically adapted to the data and allows to predict the performance of the system in advance. We perform several experiments in order to validate this novel strategy using different databases and show its advantages over using a simple threshold over the distances.