Image analysis – Applications – Personnel identification
Patent
1994-11-29
1999-11-30
Chang, Jon
Image analysis
Applications
Personnel identification
G06K 900
Patent
active
059956399
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE TECHNOLOGY
The present invention relates to apparatus for identifying persons such as identifying persons by their face images in their admission to a room or searching and outputting the name of a person whose face image resembles an input face image.
BACKGROUND TECHNOLOGY
As a prior apparatus for identifying persons by their face images there is one described in Japanese Pat. laid-open Publication No. Sho 63-177273. The composition of that apparatus is described in the following.
FIG. 15 shows a block diagram showing a composition of the prior apparatus for identifying persons by their face images. In the Figure, 21 is an image input section that inputs a face image, 22 is a feature-points extracting section comprising an analog-to-digital converter, a central processor, and a memory, 23 is a personal database section that records people's feature points on cards or the like, 24 is a judgment section that uses the feature-points information of above feature-points extracting section 22 and the feature-points information of personal database section 23 to detect their difference and identifies the person having that face image as the person of personal database 23 based on the test whether the difference is greater than a threshold value or not.
The above prior technology extracts, in feature-points extracting section 22, feature points of a person's face image input from image input section 21 and detects, in judgment section 24, the differences between these feature points and the feature points of a face image registered in personal database section 23, and identifies the person based on the amount of the difference. In this case, if the sizes of the two images are different, or if their photographing angles are different, then the differences in the feature points become great, so that even the same person is identified as a different person. In order to avoid such a situation, it was necessary to fix the distance between the image input section and a photographed person and to make him or her face turned straight toward the front. However, this method of inputting a face image imposes a burden on the photographed person, and no matter how hard the person tries to turn straight to the front, a slight rotation and inclination are inevitable, so that it was difficult to obtain an image exactly facing the front.
The basic object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus for identifying persons having high discriminating power.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus for identifying persons that performs identification with high accuracy against minor fluctuations of photographing conditions such as illumination conditions and the position of the face.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, the present invention extracts feature points of face components such as the eyes, nose, mouth, and uses the extracted feature points to divide a face image into small patches of, for example, triangles and describe a face image as the set of these patches. Then a feature amount is extracted for each patch and the set of extracted feature amounts is used to identify the face image of a person. As a feature amount, the average brightness of each patch can be used. In this case, the face image is treated as a monochromatic image, so that the processing can be simplified, and the image formed by obtained patches having graded brightnesses sufficiently reflects the characteristics of the face, that is, concavo-convexity, flatness, curvature and the like are indirectly expressed. Therefore, by using these features, identification of a person can be performed accurately. Besides average brightness, the difference in brightnesses between adjacent patches can be used as a feature amount.
A practical method applies a standard structure model that describes a standard face image as a set of patches. When the feature points of an input face image is extracted, they are compared with the feature points of the standard structure model, a
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Kado Yoshiyasu
Nakagawa Masamichi
Nobori Kunio
Chang Jon
Matsushita Electric - Industrial Co., Ltd.
Patel Jayanti K.
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