A New approach to Recognize Human Face Under Unconstrained Environment

Human face is considered as one of the most useful traits in biometrics, and it has been widely used in education, security, military and many other applications. However, in most of currently deployed face recognition systems ideal imaging conditions are assumed; to capture a fully featured images with enough quality to perform the recognition process. As the unmasked face will have a considerable impact on the numbers of new infections in the era of COVID-19 pandemic, a new unconstrained partial facial recognition method must be developed. In this research we proposed a mask detection method based on HOG (Histogram of Gradient) features descriptor and SVM (Support Vector Machine) to determine whether the face is masked or not, the proposed method was tested over 10000 randomly selected images from Masked Face-Net database and was able to correctly classify 98.73% of the tested images. Moreover, and to extract enough features from partially occluded face images, a new geometrical features extraction algorithm based on Contourlet transform was proposed. The method achieved 97.86% recognition accuracy when tested over 4784 correctly masked face images from Masked Face-Net database. Keywords: Facial Recognition, Unconstraint conditions, masked faces, HOG, Support Vector Machine.