Statistical local descriptors for face recognition: a comprehensive study

The use of local statistical descriptors for image representation has emerged and gained a reputation as a powerful approach in the last couple of decades. Many algorithms have been proposed and applied, since then, in various application areas employing different datasets, classifiers, and testing parameters. In this paper, we felt the need to make a comprehensive study of frequently-used statistical local descriptors. We investigate the effect of using different histogram-based local feature extraction algorithms on the performance of the face recognition problem. Comparisons are conducted among 18 different algorithms. These algorithms are used for the extraction of the local statistical feature descriptors of the face images. Moreover, feature fusion/concatenation of different combinations of generated feature descriptors is applied, and the relevant impact on the system performance is evaluated. Comprehensive experiments are carried out using two well-known face databases with identical experimental settings. The obtained results indicate that the fusion of the descriptors can significantly enhance the system’s performance.