Effect of Plastic Surgery on Face Recognition: A Preliminary Study

Variations in pose, expression, illumination, aging and disguise are considered as major challenges in face recognition and several techniques have been proposed to address these challenges. Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is perceptually considered as a arduous research issue; however, there is a lack of proper experimental analysis. This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of plastic surgery in face recognition algorithms. The preliminary study provides an experimental and analytical comparison of face recognition algorithms on a plastic surgery database of 506 individuals. The experimental results indicate that existing face recognition algorithms perform poorly when matching pre and post surgery face images.