Half-face based recognition using principal component analysis

Face recognition is a considerable problem in the field of image processing. It is used daily in various applications from personal cameras to forensic investigations. Most of the provides solutions proposed based on full-face images, are slow to compute and need more storage. In this paper, we propose an effective way to reduce the features and size of the database in the face recognition method and thus we get an increase in the speed of discrimination by using half of the face. Taking advantage of face symmetry, the first step is to divide the face image into two halves, then the left half is processed using the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm, and the results are compared by using Euclidian distance to distinguish the person. The system was trained and tested on ORL database. It was found that the accuracy of the system reached up to 96%, and the database was minimized by 46% and the running time was decreased from 120 msec to 70 msec with a 41.6% reduction.