Face Recognition via Archetype Hull Ranking

Yuanjun Xiong, Wei Liu, Deli Zhao, Xiaoou Tang; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 585-592

The archetype hull model is playing an important role in large-scale data analytics and mining, but rarely applied to vision problems. In this paper, we migrate such a geometric model to address face recognition and verification together through proposing a unified archetype hull ranking framework. Upon a scalable graph characterized by a compact set of archetype exemplars whose convex hull encompasses most of the training images, the proposed framework explicitly captures the relevance between any query and the stored archetypes, yielding a rank vector over the archetype hull. The archetype hull ranking is then executed on every block of face images to generate a blockwise similarity measure that is achieved by comparing two different rank vectors with respect to the same archetype hull. After integrating blockwise similarity measurements with learned importance weights, we accomplish a sensible face similarity measure which can support robust and effective face recognition and verification. We evaluate the face similarity measure in terms of experiments performed on three benchmark face databases Multi-PIE, Pubfig83, and LFW, demonstrating its performance superior to the state-of-the-arts.