Face recognition with learned local curvelet patterns and 2-directional L1-norm based 2DPCA

In this paper, we propose Learned Local Curvelet Patterns (LLCP) for presenting the local features of facial images. The proposed method is based on curvelet transform which can overcome the weakness of traditional Gabor wavelets in higher dimension, and better capture the curve singularities and hyperplane singularities of facial images. Different from wavelet transform, curvelet transform can effectively and efficiently approximate the curved edges with very few coefficients as well as taking space-frequency information into consideration. First, LLCP designs several learned codebooks from Curvelet filtered facial images. Then each facial image can be encoded into multiple pattern maps and finally block-based histograms of these patterns are concatenated into an histogram sequence to be used as a face descriptor. In order to reduce the face feature descriptor, 2-Directional L1-Norm Based 2DPCA ((2D)²PCA-L1) is proposed which is simultaneously considering the row and column directions for efficient face representation and recognition. Performance assessment in several face recognition problem shows that the proposed approach is superior to traditional ones.