Principal Components Analysis of Facial Images

 What are the building blocks of face recognition? We have recently been investigating the hypothesis that faces may be recognised through the statistical properties of images, that is, raw 2d patterns rather than some abstracted representation such as a set of distance measures or edge codes. One of the most direct ways to analyse the statistics of images is to perform Principal Components Analysis on them. This is a technique which has been developed by other groups, the interest in our lab is whether this analysis might lay the foundation for human recognition. Early signs are that this is a promising approach.

Places to read about these studies

• Hancock, P.J.B., Burton, A.M. and Bruce, V. (1995). Preprocessing images of faces: correlations with human perceptions of distinctiveness and familiarity. In Proceedings of IEE Fifth International Conference on Image Processing and its Applications, Edinburgh, July 1995.

Available on-line as a: PostScript file) (557k), or Unix compressed PostScript (239k).
 
• Hancock, P.J.B., Burton, A.M. and Bruce, V. (1996). Face processing: human perception and principal components analysis. Memory and Cognition, 24, 26-40.

Available on-line as a: PostScript file) (527k), or Unix compressed Postscript (193k).
 
• Hancock, P.J.B., Bruce, V. & Burton, A.M. (1997). Testing principal component representations for faces. In J.A. Bullinaria, D.W. Glasspool & Houghton, G. (Eds.) 4th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop: Connectionist representations. pp. 84-97, London: Springer.

Available on-line as a Unix compressed Postscript file (394k).
 
• Hancock, P.J.B., Bruce, V. and Burton, A.M. (1998). A comparison of two computer-based face recognition systems with human perceptions of faces. Vision Research, 38, 2277-2288.

 
• Burton, A.M., Bruce, V. & Hancock, P.J.B. (1999). From pixels to people: a model of familiar face recognition. Cognitive Science, 23, 1-31.

• Calder, A.J., Burton, A.M., Miller, P., Young, A.W. & Akamatsu, S. (2001).  A principal component analysis of facial expressions. Vision Research, 41, 1179-1208.

• Burton, A.M., Miller, P., Bruce, V., Hancock, P.J.B. & Henderson, Z. (2001). Human and automatic face recognition: a comparison across image formats. Vision Research, 41, 3185-3195.