v Research Article Complex Wavelet Transform-Based Face Recognition | Hindawi Publishing Corporation EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing Volume 2008 Article ID 185281 13 pages doi 2008 185281 Research Article Complex Wavelet Transform-Based Face Recognition Alaa Eleyan Huseyin Ozkaramanli and Hasan Demirel Electrical Electronic Engineering Department Eastern Mediterranean University Famagusta Northern Cyprus 10-Mersin Turkey Correspondence should be addressed to Alaa Eleyan Received 1 September 2008 Accepted 19 December 2008 Recommended by João Manuel R. S. Tavares Complex approximately analytic wavelets provide a local multiscale description of images with good directional selectivity and invariance to shifts and in-plane rotations. Similar to Gabor wavelets they are insensitive to illumination variations and facial expression changes. The complex wavelet transform is however less redundant and computationally efficient. In this paper we first construct complex approximately analytic wavelets in the single-tree context which possess Gabor-like characteristics. We then investigate the recently developed dual-tree complex wavelet transform DT-CWT and the single-tree complex wavelet transform ST-CWT for the face recognition problem. Extensive experiments are carried out on standard databases. The resulting complex wavelet-based feature vectors are as discriminating as the Gabor wavelet-derived features and at the same time are of lower dimension when compared with that of Gabor wavelets. In all experiments on two well-known databases namely FERET and ORL databases complex wavelets equaled or surpassed the performance of Gabor wavelets in recognition rate when equal number of orientations and scales is used. These findings indicate that complex wavelets can provide a successful alternative to Gabor wavelets for face recognition. Copyright 2008 Alaa Eleyan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use distribution
