Enhanced Face Recognition using Data Fusion

In this paper we scrutinize the influence of fusion on the face recognition performance. In pattern recognition task, benefiting from different uncorrelated observations and performing fusion at feature and/or decision levels improves the overall performance. In features fusion approach, we fuse (concatenate) the feature vectors obtained using different feature extractors for the same image. Classification is then performed using different similarity measures. In decisions fusion approach, the fusion is performed at decisions level, where decisions from different algorithms are fused using majority voting. The proposed method was tested using face images having different facial expressions and conditions obtained from ORL and FRAV2D databases. Simulations results show that the performance of both feature and decision fusion approaches outperforms the single performances of the fused algorithms significantly.