Facial Marks: Soft Biometric for Face Recognition

The authors propose to utilize micro features, namely facial marks (e.g., freckles, moles, and scars) to improve face recognition and retrieval performance. Facial marks can be used in three ways: to supplement the features in an existing face matcher, to enable fast retrieval from a large database using facial mark based queries, and to enable matching or retrieval from a partial or profile face image with marks. They use Active Appearance Model (AAM) to locate and segment primary facial features (e.g., eyes, nose, and mouth). Then, Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LoG) and morphological operators are used to detect facial marks.