Probabilistic identity characterization for face recognition

We present a general framework for characterizing the object identity in a single image or a group of images with each image containing a transformed version of the object, with applications to face recognition. In terms of the transformation, the group is made of either many still images or frames of a video sequence. The object identity is either discrete- or continuous-valued. This probabilistic framework integrates all the evidence of the set and handles the localization problem, illumination and pose variations through subspace identity encoding. Issues and challenges arising in this framework are addressed and efficient computational schemes are presented. Good face recognition results using the PIE database are reported.