2008 Congress on Image and Signal Processing
A New Image Enhancement Method for Face Recognition
with Single Training Sample
Jiazhong He1, Di Zhang1,2
1
School of Information Engineering, Shaoguan University
2
School of Computer Science＆ Engineering, South China University of Technology
Abstract
At present there are many methods that could deal
well with frontal view face recognition when there is
sufficient number of representative training samples
per person. However, few of them can work well when
only single training sample per person is available. In
this paper, we present a training sample enhancement
method based on Wavelet Transform (WT) low-
frequency band to improve the performance of face
recognition with a single training sample. In order to
enhance the classification information of the single
training sample, each training sample is combined
with its WT reconstructed image based on low-
frequency band into a new training sample. By using
Fourier transform, the resulting spectrum
representation of face image is used as the feature of
the face image for recognition. The experimental
results on ORL face database indicate the effectiveness
of the proposed method.
1. Introduction
With the growing interest in the development of
human and computer interface and biometric
identification, automatic recognition of faces is
considered as one of the fundamental problems in
computer vision and pattern analysis, and many
scientists from different areas have addressed it. Great
progress has been made in the area of machine
recognition and many novel methods have been
introduced in past 20 years.
Face recognition is a hard problem because there
are many image variations in real-life such as lighting,
illumination, facial expression, partial occlusion and
imprecise localization of face area. The typical
approach in handling these variations is to use large
and representative training samples set. However if the
training set is small, the performance of these
algorithms decreases. Typically, for law enforcement
applications only a single face sample is available for
978-0-7695-3119-9/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CISP.2008.715
training. In [1] and [2], face recognition algorithms are
proposed to solve the problem of single training
images. Instead of focusing on the feature extraction or
the learning stage of face recognition systems, these
methods focus on the preprocessing stage. (PC)2A [1]
combines the original training image with its vertical
and horizontal projections and then performs principal
component analysis (PCA) on the combined training
images set. SPCA [2] combines the original training
image with its derived image gotten by perturbing the
image matrix's singular values and then performs PCA
on the joined training images set. These algorithms
achieve higher recognition accuracy with far fewer
eigenfaces than the standard eigenface algorithm on the
FERET database when only one training image per
person is available.
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a well-
known data representation technique widely used in
pattern recognition and signal processing. However
image registration is required in PCA-based approach.
This approach gives a very good result if the face to be
recognized is aligned properly. Lai et al. [3] have
demonstrated that the recognition accuracy using PCA
falls from 85.5, 81.7, 76.7, and 70.0-67.5% if the
alignment is deviated from 0 to 4 pixels error.
Fourier transform is a traditional and effective tool
of signal analysis. It has been widely used in face
recognition. Fourier transform is invariant against
spatial translation. In the process of face recognition,
applying the 2D discrete Fourier transform to the face
image and using the resulting Fourier spectrum instead
of the spatial data from the face image, the translation
error which caused by the spatial position offset can be
eliminated entirely and as a result, the recognition
accuracy will be improved.
To overcome the alignment problem in template-
based approach and enhance the classification
information of the single training sample, along the
line of [1] and [2], instead of focusing on the feature
extraction or the learning stage of face recognition
system, this paper focuses on the preprocessing stage.
216
We present a training sample enhancement method
based on Wavelet Transform (WT) to improve the
performance of face recognition with a single training
sample. Each original training image is combined with
its WT reconstructed image based on low-frequency
band into a new training image. Fourier transform is
used for feature extraction, and then L1 nearest
neighbor classifier is employed for classification.
2. Enhancement of training image
Wavelet Transform (WT) has been proven effective
for image analysis and feature extraction. It represents
a signal by localizing it in both time and frequency
domains. WT divides an image into four different
frequency bands as shown in Fig.1. By further
decomposing the low-frequency band, we can perform
the multi-resolution analysis, which has been widely
adopted in image processing.
LL LH
HL HH
Figure 1. 1-level WT decomposition
In Figure 1, the band LL is the low-frequency band
of the original image. The bands LH and HL record the
changes of the image along horizontal and vertical
directions. While the HH band shows the high
frequency component of the image. Nastar et al. [4, 5]
have investigated the relationship between variations in
facial appearance and their deformation spectrum.
They found that facial expressions and small occlusion
affect the intensity manifold locally. Under frequency-
based representation, only high-frequency spectrum is
affected, called high-frequency phenomenon.
Moreover, changes in pose or scale of a face affect the
intensity manifold globally, in which only their low-
frequency spectrum is affected, called low-frequency
phenomenon. Only a change in face will affect all
frequency components. The above statements show
that the band LL is insensitive to the facial expressions
and small occlusion. Therefore, we focus on the WT
reconstructed image of the 3-level low-frequency band
in this paper.
According to Jain [6], a pattern recognition system
includes three modules, i.e. the preprocessing stage,
the feature extraction, and the learning stage. The first
stage is important to recognition system but often
217
catches less attention. This paper focuses on the
preprocessing stage. Each original training image is
combined with its WT reconstructed image based on
low-frequency band into a new training image.
For face image f ( x, y ) , let f r ( x, y ) is its WT
reconstructed image based on low-frequency band.
Then we combine f ( x, y ) with f r ( x, y ) to generate a
newly combined training image according to the
following equation:
f ( x, y ) + α ⋅ f r ( x, y )
fα ( x, y ) = (1)
1+α
where α is called combination parameter，in our
experiments α is set to 0.25.
3. Fourier transform
Fourier transform is an effective tool for signal
analysis. It has been widely used in face recognition.
For 2D image f(x, y) with the size of N×M, 2D discrete
Fourier transform is defined as:
1 M −1 N −1   ux vy  
F ( u, v ) = ∑ ∑ f ( x, y ) exp  −2π i  M + N   (2)
MN x = 0 y =0  
For u = 0,1,2," , M − 1 , v = 0,1,2,", N − 1 . Fourier
transform has the following property:
  ux vy  
f ( x − x0 , y − y0 ) ⇔ F (u , v) exp  − j 2π  0 + 0   (3)
 M N 
Formula (3) indicates that Fourier transform is
invariant against spatial translation. In the process of
face recognition, applying the 2D discrete Fourier
transform to the face image and using the resulting
Fourier spectrum instead of the spatial data from the
face image, the translation error which cause by the
spatial position offset can be eliminated entirely and as
a result, the recognition accuracy will be improved.
4. Outline of the proposed approach
The main processing steps of the proposed
algorithm may be summarized as follows:
Step 1: normalize the intensity of the face image.
after normalized, each original training image is
combined with its WT reconstructed image based on
low-frequency band into a new version of the original
training image.
Step 2: In the training stage, 2D discrete Fourier
transform is applied to the newly combined training
image and the resulting Fourier spectrum is used as the
feature of training image for recognition.
Step 3: In the recognition stage, 2D discrete Fourier
transform is applied on the normalized test image and
the resulting Fourier spectrum is used as the feature of
the test image for recognition.
 Step 4: The L1 distance is used to measure the
similarity between the two feature vectors.
5. Experiment
We use the ORL database (http://www.cam-
orl.co.uk) that contains a set of faces taken between
April 1992 and April 1994 at the Olivetti Research
Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. There are 10 different
images of 40 distinct subjects. For some of the
subjects, the images were taken at different times,
varying lighting slightly, facial expressions
(open/closed eyes, smiling/non-smiling) and facial
details (glasses/no-glasses). All the images are taken
against a dark homogeneous background and the
We can see from Figure 3 that as α gradually
increases, the recognition accuracy increases at the
beginning and decreases at the end. This may suggest
that choosing an appropriate value for α is important
to the recognition performance. According to Figure 3,
the proper value of α lies in the range of
0.15 < α < 0.35 .
100
90
80
70

rank 1 accuracy (%)

subjects are in up-right, frontal position (with tolerance 60
for some side movement). The size of each image is 92 50
×112, 8-bit grey levels. One of the persons is shown 40
in Figure 2. In this paper experiments were performed
30
with one normal training image and 9 test images for
each person. 20

10

0
-0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
combination parameter α

Figure 3. Accuracy versus combination parameter

Figure 2. One person in the ORL database
Comparative experimental results are shown in
Table1. Here, α is set to 0.25. We can see from Table
1 that the proposed training image enhancement
method gives 14% improvement in recognition
accuracy over the result based on the original training
image.
The proposed method introduces the combination
parameter α . In order to know the influence of
combination parameter α on the recognition
performance, we perform some experiments based on
the combined training image with different values of
α . The rank1 accuracy is shown in Figure 3. Here,
WT reconstructed image is based on 3-level low-
frequency band.
Table 1. Recognition accuracy comparison
Training image Rank 1(%) Rank 3(%)
Combined 85.83 89.72
Original 71.67 83.61
6. Conclusion
In this paper, we present a training image
enhancement method based on WT to solve the single
training sample problem. To enhance the classification
information of the single training sample, each original
training image is combined with its WT reconstructed
image based on 3-level low-frequency band into a new
training image. The experimental results on ORL face
database indicate the effectiveness of the proposed
method.
7. References
[1] J.Wu, Z.-H, Zhou, “Face recognition with one training
image per person”, Pattern Recognition Letters, 23(14), 2002,
pp.1711-1719.
[2] D. Zhang, S. Chen, and Z.-H. Zhou, “A new face
recognition method based on SVD perturbation for single
example image per person”, Applied Mathematics and
Computation, 163(2), 2005, pp.895-907.
[3] J.H. Lai, P.C. Yuen, G.C. Feng, “Spectroface: a Fourier-
based approach for human face recognition”, in: Proceeding
of the Second International Conference on Multimodal
Interface, Vol. 2, Hong Kong, 1999, pp. VI 115-120.

218
[4] C.Nastar, B.Moghaddam, A.Pentland, “Flexible images:
matching and recognition using learned deformations”,
Comput. Vision Image Understanding, 65(2), 1997, pp.179-
191.
[5] C.Nastar, N.Ayache, “Frequency-based non-rigid motion
analysis”, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence, 18(11),1996, pp.1067-1079.
219
[6] A.K. Jain, R.P.W. Duin, J.C. Mao, “Statistical pattern
recognition: a review”, IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22(1), 2002, pp.4-37.
8. Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Grant No: 60772117).