IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 16, NO.
3, MAY 2005
High-Speed Face Recognition Based on Discrete
Cosine Transform and RBF Neural Networks
Meng Joo Er, Member, IEEE, Weilong Chen, and Shiqian Wu, Member, IEEE
Abstract—In this paper, an efficient method for high-speed
face recognition based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT),
the Fisher’s linear discriminant (FLD) and radial basis function
(RBF) neural networks is presented. First, the dimensionality of
the original face image is reduced by using the DCT and the large
area illumination variations are alleviated by discarding the first
few low-frequency DCT coefficients. Next, the truncated DCT
coefficient vectors are clustered using the proposed clustering
algorithm. This process makes the subsequent FLD more efficient.
After implementing the FLD, the most discriminating and in-
variant facial features are maintained and the training samples are
clustered well. As a consequence, further parameter estimation
for the RBF neural networks is fulfilled easily which facilitates
fast training in the RBF neural networks. Simulation results show
that the proposed system achieves excellent performance with
high training and recognition speed, high recognition rate as well
as very good illumination robustness.
Index Terms—Discrete cosine transform (DCT), face recogni-
tion, FERET database, Fisher’s linear discriminant (FLD), illumi-
nation invariance, Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) database,
radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, Yale database.
I. INTRODUCTION
UMAN face recognition has become a very active research
H area in recent years mainly due to increasing security de-
mands and its potential commercial and law enforcement applica-
tions. Numerous approaches have been proposed for face recog-
nition and considerable successes have been reported [1]. How-
ever, it is still a difficult task for a machine to recognize human
faces accurately in real-time, especially under variable circum-
stances such as variations in illumination, pose, facial expression,
makeup, etc. The similarity of human faces and the unpredictable
variations are the greatest obstacles in face recognition.
Generally speaking, research on face recognition can be
grouped into two categories, namely, feature-based and holistic
(also called template matching) approaches [1], [2]. Fea-
ture-based approaches are based on the shapes and geometrical
relationships of individual facial features including eyes, mouth,
nose, and chin. On the other hand, holistic approaches handle the
input face images globally and extract important facial features
based on the high-dimensional intensity values of face images
automatically. Although feature-based schemes are more robust
against rotation, scale, and illumination variations, they greatly
rely on the accuracy of facial feature detection methods and it has
Manuscript received April 25, 2003; revised July 19, 2004.
W. Chen and M. J. Er are with the Computer Control Laboratory, School
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore 639758, Singapore (e-mail: emjer@ntu.edu.sg).
S. Wu is with the Department of Human Centric Media, Institute for Info-
comm Research, Singapore 119613, Singapore.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNN.2005.844909
1045-9227/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
679
been argued that existing feature-based techniques are not reli-
able enough for extracting individual facial features. Holistic face
recognition has attracted more attention since the well-known
statistical method, the principal component analysis (PCA) [also
known as Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT)] was applied in
face recognition [3], [4]. Another well-known approach is the
Fisherfaces in which the Fisher’s linear discriminant (FLD) is
employed after the PCA is used for dimensionality reduction [5].
Compared with the Eigenface (PCA) approach, the fisherface
approach is more insensitive to large variations in lighting direc-
tion and facial expression. More recently, some variants of FLD
(LDA) have been developed for face recognition such as F-LDA
[7], D-LDA [8], FD-LDA [9], and KDDA [10] etc. However,
the computational requirements of these approaches are greatly
related to the dimensionality of the original data and the number
of training samples. When the face database becomes larger, the
time for training and the memory requirement will significantly
increase. Moreover, the system based on the PCA should be
retrained when new classes are added. As a consequence, it is
impractical to apply the PCA in systems with a large database.
The discrete cosine transform (DCT) has been employed in face
recognition [11]–[14]. The DCT has several advantages over
the PCA. First, the DCT is data independent. Second, the DCT
can be implemented using a fast algorithm. In [11], the DCT
is applied for dimensionality reduction and then the selected
low-frequency DCT coefficient vectors are fed into a multilayer
perceptron (MLP) classifier. It is well-known that the problems
arising from the curse of dimensionality should be considered in
pattern recognition. It has been suggested that as the dimension-
ality increases, the sample size needs to increase exponentially
in order to have an effective estimate of multivariate densities
[16]. In face recognition applications, the original input data are
usually of high dimension, whereas, only limited training sam-
ples are available. Therefore, dimensionality reduction is a very
important step which will greatly improve the performance of the
face recognition system. However, if only the DCT is employed
for dimensionality reduction, we cannot keep enough frequency
components for important facial features in order to compromise
the problem of curse of dimensionality. Besides, some variable
features exist in the low-dimensional features extracted by the
DCT. Hence, in our proposed system, the FLD is also employed
in the DCT domain to extract the most discriminating features of
face images. With the combination of DCT and FLD, more DCT
coefficients can be kept and the most discriminating features can
be extracted at high speed.
In [22], the clustering process is implemented after the FLD is
employed. However, the FLD is a linear projection method and
the results are globally optimal only for linearly separable data.
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Fig. 1. Block diagram of high-speed face recognition based on DCT and RBF neural networks.
There are lots of nonlinear variations in human faces such as
pose and expression. Once the faces with different poses are put
into the same class, they will actually smear the optimal projec-
tion such that we cannot get the most discriminating feature and
good generalization. For this reason, we should ensure that the
face images in each class should not have large nonlinear varia-
tions. In this paper, instead of regarding each individual as one
class, we propose a subclustering method to split one class into
several subclasses before implementing the FLD. Moreover, the
subclustering process is very crucial to structure determination
of the following radial basis function (RBF) neural networks. In
fact, the number of clusters is just the number of hidden neurons
in the RBF neural networks.
Neural networks have been widely applied in pattern recogni-
tion for the reason that neural-networks-based classifiers can in-
corporate both statistical and structural information and achieve
better performance than the simple minimum distance classifiers
[1]. Multilayered networks (MLNs), usually employing the back-
propagation (BP) algorithm, are widely used in face recognition
[21]. Recently, RBF neural networks have been applied in many
engineering and scientific applications including facerecognition
[22], [23]. The RBF neural networks possess the following salient
features: 1) They are universal approximators [25]; 2) they have
a simple topological structure [26]; 3) they can implement fast
learning algorithms because of locally tuned neurons [27]. Based
ontheadvantagesofRBFneuralnetworksandtheefficientfeature
extraction method, a high-speed RBF neural networks classifier
whereby near-optimal parameters can be estimated according to
the properties of the feature space instead of using the gradient
descent training algorithm is proposed in this paper. As a conse-
quence, our system is able to achieve high training and recogni-
tion speed which facilitates real-time applications of the proposed
face recognition system. The block diagram of our proposed face
recognition system is shown in Fig. 1.
The organization of the paper is as follows. In Section II,
we first present the DCT-based feature extraction method to-
gether with its relevant properties against illumination varia-
tions. Then, the proposed clustering algorithm and the FLD
method implemented in the DCT domain are presented. Sec-
tion III describes the architecture of RBF neural networks and
the parameter estimation approach, which is based on the prop-
erties of previously extracted feature vectors. Experimental re-
sults are presented and discussed in Section IV. Finally, conclu-
sions are drawn in Section V.
II. FEATURE EXTRACTION
A. DCT
The DCT has been widely applied to solve numerous prob-
lems among the digital signal processing community. In partic-
ular, many data compression techniques employ the DCT, which
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, MAY 2005
has been found to be asymptotically equivalent to the optimal
Karhunen-Loeve Transform (KLT) for signal decorrelation. The
formula of DCT and its inverse transform can be found in [15].
In the JPEG image compression standard, original images
are initially partitioned into rectangular nonoverlapping blocks
(8 8 blocks) and then the DCT is performed independently on
the subimage blocks [15]. In our proposed system, we simply
apply the DCT on the entire face image. If the DCT is only ap-
plied to the subimage independently, some relationship informa-
tion between subimages cannot be obtained. However, we can
obtain all frequency components of a face image by applying the
DCT on the entire face image. In addition, some low-frequency
components are only related to the illumination variations which
can be discarded.
For an image, we have an DCT coefficient ma-
trix covering all the spatial frequency components of the image.
The DCT coefficients with large magnitude are mainly located
in the upper-left corner of the DCT matrix. Accordingly, as il-
lustrated in Fig. 2, we scan the DCT coefficient matrix in a
zig-zag manner starting from the upper-left corner and subse-
quently convert it to a one-dimensional (1-D) vector. Detailed
discussions about image reconstruction errors using only a few
significant DCT coefficients can be found in [11]. As a holistic
feature extraction method, the DCT converts high-dimensional
face images into low-dimensional spaces in which more signif-
icant facial features such as outline of hair and face, position of
eyes, nose and mouth are maintained. These facial features are
more stable than the variable high-frequency facial features. As
a matter of fact, the human visual system is more sensitive to
variations in the low-frequency band.
Illumination variations are still an unsolved problem in face
recognition, particularly for the holistic approach. For the PCA
(Eigenface) method, it has been suggested that by discarding the
three most significant principal components, variations due to
lighting can be reduced. In [5], experimental results showed that
the PCA method performs better under variable lighting condi-
tions after removing the first three principal components. How-
ever, the first several components not only correspond to illumi-
nation variations, but also some useful information for dicrimi-
nation [5]. Besides, since the PCA method is highly dependent
on the training samples, different components are obtained with
different training samples. Therefore, there is no guarantee that
the first three principal components are definitely related to the
illumination variations. In this paper, we investigate the illumi-
nation invariant property of the DCT by discarding its several
low-frequency coefficients. It is well-known that the first DCT
coefficient represents the dc component of an image which is
solely related to the brightness of the image. Therefore, it be-
comes DC-free (i.e., zero mean) and invariant against uniform
brightness change by simply removing the first DCT coefficient.
Fig. 3 illustrates the robustness of the DC-free DCT against uni-
form brightness variation.
CHEN et al.: HIGH-SPEED FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON DCT AND RBF NEURAL NETWORKS
Fig. 2. Scheme of scanning two-dimensional (2-D) DCT coefficients to a 1-D
vector
Fig. 3. Illustration of the brightness invariance of the DC-free DCT. (a) and (b)
Same images with different brightness. (c) and (d) Are, respectively, obtained
from the inverse DCT transform of (a) and (b) after setting the first coefficients
to the same value. Since the first coefficient represents the dc component of
the image, after inverse DCT transform, some of the image intensity values
will become negative if the first coefficient is set to zero. Therefore, in order to
display the images correctly after taking the inverse DCT transform, we choose
a median value between the first DCT coefficients of (a) and (b).
It should be noted that the two reconstructed images in
Fig. 3(c) and (d) are slightly different. This is because in ad-
justing the original image to different levels of brightness, some
intensity values of the image reach the maximum or minimum
value (for an 8-b grayscale intensity image, the maximum
and minimum intensity value is 255 and 0, respectively) and
some information is lost. In addition, the DC-free DCT is only
invariant against linear brightness variations. In other words, it
is not robust against varying contrast.
Some of the low-frequency components of DCT also account
for the large area nonuniform illumination variations. Con-
sequently, the nonuniform illumination effect can be reduced
by discarding several low-frequency DCT coefficients. Face
images under different lighting conditions and their corre-
sponding reconstructed images after discarding the first three
coefficients are illustrated in Fig. 4. In the proposed system,
the truncated DCT works like a bandpass filter which inhibits
high-frequency irrelevant information and low-frequency illu-
mination variations.
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Fig. 4. Effect of nonuniform illumination reduction of DCT after discarding
the first three coefficients. (a)–(c) are under different lighting condition
(center-light, left-light, right-light). (d)–(f) are obtained from the inverse DCT
transform after setting the first coefficient to the same appropriate value, the
second and the third coefficients to zero.
Fig. 5. Clustering with category information.
B. Clustering
Several well-known clustering algorithms such as -means
clustering and fuzzy -means clustering are widely used in RBF
neural networks [27], [30]. However, these clustering approaches
are unsupervised learning algorithms and no category informa-
tion about patterns is used. On the contrary, in face recognition,
category information of training samples is previously known.
Accordingly, we can simply cluster the training samples in each
class. As depicted in Fig. 5, it is impossible for a purely unsuper-
vised clustering algorithm to separate each class accurately.
In the proposed system, the classes are split in terms of their
Euclidean distances. It is unreasonable to split the classes ac-
cording to the degree of overlap because there are still great
overlaps between classes after performing the DCT. Moreover,
the following FLD will reduce the within-class scatter and, thus,
make the sparsely distributed training samples in each subclass
tighter. Hence, we only need to prevent the samples with large
variations from being clustered in the same subclass. The pro-
posed clustering algorithm is as follows.
1) Let be the number of total clusters and be the
number of classes. Initially, set each class to be one
cluster, i.e., .
2) Find two training samples with
the largest Euclidean distance in class
682 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, MAY 2005

. These two samples are called carefully so that the FLD will work efficiently. After the clustering
clustering reference sample (CRS). algorithm and the FLD are implemented, the sparsely distributed
3) Compute the Euclidean distances from the two training samples cluster more tightly which simplifies parameter
samples to the samples in other classes estimation of the RBF neural networks in the sequel.
, denoted as and
, where is the number C. FLD
of samples not belonging to class , respectively as In order to obtain the most salient and invariant feature of
follows: human faces, the FLD is applied in the truncated DCT domain.
The FLD is one of the most popular linear projection methods
(1) for feature extraction. It is used to find a linear projection of
(2) the original vectors from a high-dimensional space to an op-
timal low-dimensional subspace in which the ratio of the be-
where denotes the Euclidean norm. tween-class scatter and the within-class scatter is maximized.
4) Compute the mean value and the standard deviation of In this paper, we apply the FLD to discount variations such as
as follows: illumination and expression. The details about the FLD can be
found in [2]. It should be noted that we apply the FLD after
clustering such that the most discriminating facial feature can
(3)
be effectively extracted. The discriminating feature vectors
projected from the truncated DCT domain to the optimal sub-
space can be calculated as follows:
(4)
(9)
where are truncated DCT coefficient vectors, and is
(5) the FLD optimal projection matrix.

III. CLASSIFICATION USING RBF NEURAL NETWORKS

(6) A. Structure Determination and Parameter Estimation of RBF
Neural Networks
5) Define the scope radius of the two CRSes The traditional three-layer RBF neural networks are em-
as follows: ployed for classification in the proposed system. The archi-
tecture is identical to the one used in [22]. We employ the
(7) most frequently used Gaussian function as the radial basis
(8) function since it best approximates the distribution of data
in each subset. In face recognition applications, the RBF
where is a positive constant clustering factor. If neural networks are regarded as a mapping from the feature
, then split the cluster hyperspace to the classes. Therefore, the number of inputs of
into two clusters with CRSes and , re- RBF neural networks is determined by the dimension of input
spectively, and set . vectors. In the proposed system, the truncated DCT vectors
6) There are three scenarios for any sample in class after implementing the FLD are fed to the input layer of the
( is not CRS). These scenarios as depicted in RBF neural networks. The number of outputs is equal to the
Fig. 6 will be handled as follows: class number. The hidden neurons are very crucial to the RBF
i) If only one CRS’s scope comprises , then neural networks, which represent the subset of the input data.
will be merged with the cluster to which this CRS be- After the clustering algorithm is implemented, the FLD projects
longs. the training samples into the subspace in which the training
ii) If more than one CRS’s scope comprise , then samples are clustered more tightly. Our experimental results
will be merged into the cluster to which the CRS show that the training samples are well separated and there are
with the shortest distance to belongs. no overlaps between subclasses after the FLD is performed.
iii) If no CRS’s scope comprise , then is re- Consequently, in our system, the number of subclasses (i.e.,
garded as another CRS belonging to a new cluster. Set the number of hidden neurons of the RBF neural networks) is
and compute the radius according to determined by the previous clustering process.
steps (4)–(5). Repeat step (6), until dose not change. In the proposed system, we simplify the estimation of the
7) Apply steps (2)–(6) to all classes. RBF parameters according to the data properties instead of su-
It follows from (7) and (8) that the radius of the CRS is chosen pervised learning since the nonlinear supervised method often
according to the mean distance and standard deviation from this suffers from having a long training time and the possibility of
CRS to the training samples belonging to other classes. The clus- being trapped in local minima. Two important parameters are
tering factor controls the clustering extent. The larger the value associated with each RBF unit, the center and the width
of , the more clusters there are. Therefore, should be chosen . Each center should well represent each subclass because
CHEN et al.: HIGH-SPEED FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON DCT AND RBF NEURAL NETWORKS
Fig. 6. Illustration of one class split into three subclasses.
the classification is actually based on the distances between the
input samples and the centers of each subclass. There are dif-
ferent strategies in selecting RBF centers with respect to dif-
ferent applications [24]. Here, as the FLD keeps the most dis-
criminating feature for each sample in each subclass, it is rea-
sonable to choose the mean value of the training samples in
every subclass as the RBF center as follows:
(10)
where is the th sample in the th subclass and is the
number of training samples in the th subclass.
1) Width Estimation: To our knowledge, every subclass has
its own features which lead to different scopes for each subclass.
The width of an RBF unit describes the properties of a subclass
because the width of a Gaussian function represents the stan-
dard deviation of the function. Besides, the width controls the
amount of overlap of Gaussian functions. If the widths are too
large, there will be great overlaps between classes so that the
RBF units cannot represent the subclasses well and the output
belonging to the class will not be so significant which will lead
to great misclassifications. On the contrary, too small a width
will result in rapid reduction in the value of a Gaussian function
and, thus, poor generalization [28]. Accordingly, our goal is to
select the width that minimizes the overlaps between different
classes so as to preserve local properties as well as maximize
the generalization ability of the network.
As foreshadowed earlier, the FLD makes the subclasses well
separate. However, it has been indicated that the FLD method
achieves the best performance on the training data, but gener-
alizes poorly to new individuals, particularly when the training
data set is small [29]. The distribution of training samples cannot
well represent the new inputs. Hence, in this special case, the
width of each subclass cannot be estimated merely according
to the small number of training samples in each subclass. Our
studies show that the distances from the centers of RBF units
to the new input samples belonging to other classes are similar
to the distances to the training samples in other classes. These
distances can be used to estimate the widths of RBF units since
they generally imply the range of RBF units. In [31], it has been
indicated that the patterns which are not consistent with data
statistics (noisy patterns) should be rejected rather than used for
683
training. Accordingly, the following method for width estima-
tion is proposed:
(11)
(12)
where is the center of the th cluster belonging to the th
class and is the center of the th cluster belonging to the th
class and is the median distance from the th center to
the centers belonging to other classes. In the proposed system,
since the centers of RBF units well represent the training sam-
ples in each cluster, we estimate the width of one cluster by cal-
culating the distances from this center to the centers belonging
to other classes instead of the individual training samples so as
to avoid excessive computational complexity. Hence, the width
of the th cluster is estimated as follows:
(13)
where is a factor that controls the overlap of this cluster with
other clusters belonging to different classes. Equation (13) is de-
rived from the Gaussian function. It should be noted that
is determined by the distances to the cluster centers belonging to
other classes (not other clusters) because one class can be split
into several clusters and the overlaps between clusters from the
same class are allowed to be great. The median distance
well measures the relative scope of RBF units. Furthermore, by
selecting the proper factor , suitable overlaps between different
classes can be guaranteed.
2) Weight Adjustment: In the first stage, we estimate
the parameters of the RBF units by using unsupervised
training methods. The second phase of training is to optimize
second-layer weights of the RBF neural networks. Since the
output of the RBF neural networks is a linear model, we can
apply linear supervised learning to minimize a suitable error
function. The sum-of-squares error function is given by
(14)
where is the target value for output unit when the th training
sample is fed to the network,
is the th output of the RBF unit, is the number of RBF units
generated according to the clustering algorithm in Section II-B
684
and is the total number of training samples. This problem can
be solved by the linear least square (LLS) paradigm [16].
Let and be the number of input and output neurons, re-
spectively. Furthermore, let be the RBF unit matrix
and be the target matrix con-
sisting of “1’s” and “0’s” with exactly one per column that iden-
tifies the processing unit to which a given exemplar belongs. The
problem of finding an optimal weight matrix such
that the error function (14) is minimized is as follows:
(15)
where is the pseudoinverse of and is given by
(16)
In the proposed system, however, direct solution of (16) can lead
to numerical difficulties due to the possibility of being sin-
gular or near singular. This problem can be best solved by using
the technique of singular value decomposition (SVD) [32].
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
In order to evaluate the proposed face recognition system, our
experiments are performed on three benchmark face databases:
1) The Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) database; 2) The
FERET database; 3) The Yale database. Besides, for each
database, we use three different evaluation methods which are
mostly used in each database, respectively. In this way, the
experiment results can be compared with other face recognition
approaches fairly.
A. Testing on the ORL Database
First, our face recognition system is tested on the ORL data-
base. There are 400 images of 40 subjects. In the following
experiments, five images are randomly selected as the training
samples and another five images as test images. Therefore, a
total of 200 images are used for training and another 200 for
testing and there are no overlaps between the training and testing
sets. Here, we verify our system based on the average error rate,
, which is defined as
(17)
where is the number of simulation runs. (The proposed system
is evaluated on ten runs, 10.), is the number of misclas-
sifications for the th run and is the total number of testing
samples for each run. We also denote the maximum and min-
imum misclassification rates for the ten runs as and , . We should not choose the exact minimum value
respectively.
The dimension of feature vectors fed into the RBF neural net-
works is essential for recognition. In [22], experimental results
showed that the best results are achieved when the feature di-
mension is 25–30. If the feature dimension is too small, the fea-
ture vectors do not contain sufficient information for recogni-
tion. However, it does not mean that more information will result
in higher recognition rate. It has been indicated that if the dimen-
sion of the network input is comparable to the size of the training
set, the system is liable to overfitting and result in poor gen-
eralization [17]. Moreover, the addition of some unimportant
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, MAY 2005
Fig. 7. RMSE curve.
information may become noise and degrade the performance.
Our experiments also showed that the best recognition rates are
achieved when the feature dimension is about 30. Hence, the
feature dimension of 30 will be adopted in the following simu-
lation studies.
1) Parameter Selection: Two parameters, namely the clus-
tering factor and the overlapping factor need to be determined.
As foreshadowed in Section II-B, the subclustering process is
based on the mean value and standard deviation of the distances
from the CRS to the samples in other classes. Normally, we can
choose 1 as the initial value since the difference between
the mean distance and standard deviation approximately implies
the scope of CRS. Nevertheless, with different databases and ap-
plications, the proper value of should be adjusted accordingly.
For the ORL database, the following experimental results show
that the proper value of lies in the range of .
Since the overlapping factor is not related to , we can fix the
value of when estimating . The value of is set to 1 for the fol-
lowing parameter estimation process. It follows from (13) that the
factor actually represents the output of the RBF unit when the
distance between the input and the RBF center is equal to . As
a result, should be a small value. We can initially assume that
liesintherangeof .Moreoptimalandprecise canbe
further estimated by finding the minimum value of the root mean
square error (RMSE). The RMSE curves for five different training
sets are depicted in Fig. 7. It is evident that there is only one min-
imum value in each RMSE curve and it usually lies in the range of
of because the FLD makes the training samples in each cluster
tighter in comparison with the testing samples. Accordingly, in
order to obtain better generalization, we choose a slightly larger
value for . In the following experiments, we choose the value of
0.1forthe overlapping factor which is shown to be a proper value
for the RBF width estimation in our system.
2) Number of DCT Coefficients: In order to determine how
many DCT coefficients should be chosen, we test the recogni-
tion performance with different number of DCT coefficients.
Simulation results are summarized in Table I. Here, the clus-
tering coefficient is set to 1. We can see from Table I that
CHEN et al.: HIGH-SPEED FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON DCT AND RBF NEURAL NETWORKS
TABLE I
RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE VERSUS NUMBER OF DCT COEFFICIENTS
= 0.1)
( = 1
= 0.1)
TABLE II
RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE VERSUS CLUSTERING FACTOR (
= 0.1)
more DCT coefficients do not necessarily mean better recog-
nition performance because high-frequency components are re-
lated to unstable facial features such as expression. There will be
more variable information for recognition when the DCT coeffi-
cients increase. According to Table I, the best performance is ob-
tained when 50–60 DCT coefficients are used in our recognition
system. In addition, Table I shows that the performance of our
system is relatively stable when the number of DCT coefficients
changes significantly. This is mainly due to the FLD algorithm
which discounts the irrelevant information as well as keeps the
most invariant and discriminating information for recognition.
3) Effect of Clustering: As mentioned in Section II, the
FLD is a linear projection paradigm and it cannot handle
nonlinear variations in each class. Therefore, the proposed
subclustering algorithm is applied before taking the FLD. The
clustering factor controls the extent of clustering as well as
determines the number of RBF units. Small number of clusters
may lead to great overlap between classes and cannot obtain
the optimal FLD projection direction. On the other hand, an
increase of clusters may result in poor generalization because
of overfitting. Moreover, since the training samples in each
class are limited, the increase of clusters leads to reduction
of training samples in each cluster so that the FLD will work
inefficiently. Table II shows one run of the recognition results
with different numbers of clusters where denotes the mis-
classification rate. The best performance is obtained when
lies in the range of 1.0–2.0. The results show that subclustering
will improve the performance even when the FLD is applied
on small clusters. Without the clustering process, face images
with large nonlinear variations will be in the same cluster. The
FLD will discount some important facial features instead of
extracting them since the FLD is a linear global projection
685
TABLE III
PERFORMANCE ON 10 SIMULATIONS ( = 1.5;
TABLE IV
RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES
method. Therefore, for face images with large variations such
as pose, scale etc., the subclustering is necessary before imple-
menting the FLD. This process will be more effective if there
are more training samples for each cluster.
By setting the optimal parameters in the proposed system, we
obtain high recognition performance based on ten simulation
studies whose results are shown in Table III.
4) Comparisons With Other Approaches: Many face recog-
nition approaches have been performed on the ORL database.
In order to compare the recognition performance, we choose
some recent approaches tested under similar conditions for
comparison. Approaches are evaluated on recognition rate,
training time and recognition time. Comparative results of
different approaches are shown in Table IV. Our experiments
are performed on a Pentium II 350M computer, using Win-
dows 2000 and Matlab 6.1. It is hard to compare the speed of
different algorithms performed on different computing plat-
forms. Nevertheless, according to the information of different
computing systems as listed in Table IV, we can approximately
compare their relative speeds. It is evident from the table that
our proposed approach achieves high recognition rate as well
as high training and recognition speed.
5) Computational Complexity: In this section, in order to
provide more information about the computational efficiency of
the proposed system, the approximate complexity of each part
is analyzed and the results are summarized in Table V.
In face recognition applications, the dimensionality of an
original face image is usually considerably greater than the
number of training samples. Therefore, the computational com-
plexity mostly lies in the dimensionality reduction stage. The
training and recognition speed are greatly improved because the
fast DCT reduces the computational complexity from
to for an image where is a power of 2.
Moreover, the proposed parameter estimation method is much
faster than the gradient descent training algorithm which will
take up to hundreds of epochs.
6) Performances With Different Numbers of Training Sam-
ples: Since the FLD is a statistical method for feature extrac-
tion, the choice of training samples will affect its performance.
In [6], the authors indicate that the FLD works efficiently only
686
TABLE V
COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
Fig. 8. Performances with different number of training samples (results are
based on ten runs).
when the number of training samples is large and representative
for each class. Moreover, small number of training samples will
result in poor generalization for each RBF unit. Simulation re-
sults with different numbers of training samples are shown in
Fig. 8. Our approach is promising if more training samples are
available.
7) Performances After Discarding Several DCT Coeffi-
cients: As illustrated in Section II, the DC-free DCT has the
robustness against linear brightness variations. The truncated
DCT also alleviates the effect of the large area nonuniform
illumination by discarding several low-frequency components.
However, there are no such large illumination variations in
the ORL database. Therefore, discarding the first three DCT
coefficients will not get better performance. On the contrary,
the performance will get worse (see Table VIII). The reason
is that some holistic facial features, for example, the relative
intensity of the hair and the face skin, will be more or less
ruined since they are low-frequency components (see Fig. 9).
In fact, this kind of influence is slight compared to large area
illumination variations. We can see from Fig. 9 that the main
facial features such as face outline, eyes, nose and mouth are
maintained well after discarding several low-frequency DCT
coefficients. Furthermore, in many face recognition applica-
tions, only faces without hair are used for recognition for the
reason that the human’s hair is an unstable feature which will
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, MAY 2005
Fig. 9. Reconstructed images after discarding several low-frequency DCT
coefficients. (a) Original image. (b) Reconstructed image after discarding the
first three DCT coefficients. (c) Reconstructed image after discarding the first
six DCT coefficients (in order to display the image, the first coefficient is
actually retained).
Fig. 10. Examples of normalized FERET face images from four subsets. (a)
Dup 1. (b) Dup 2. (c) Fafb. (d) Fafc.
change greatly with time. In this case, discarding the first
several low-frequency DCT coefficients will mainly reduce
large area illumination variations.
B. Testing on the Feret Database
The proposed feature extraction method is also tested on the
FERET database which contains more subjects with different
variations [37]. We employ the Colorado State University
(CSU) Face Identification Evaluation System to evaluate our
feature extraction method [38]. The original face images are
first normalized by using the preprocessing program provided
in the CSU evaluation system. Examples of normalized images
are shown in Fig. 10. Four testing probe subsets with different
evaluation tasks are used (see Fig. 10 and Table VII). We
only compare our proposed feature extraction method with the
baseline PCA method with or without the first three principal
components. To generate the cumulative match curve, the
Euclidean distance measure is used. Here we only evaluate our
proposed feature extraction method but not the classifier. Since
CHEN et al.: HIGH-SPEED FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON DCT AND RBF NEURAL NETWORKS
Fig. 11. Cumulative match curves. (a) Dup1. (b) Dup2. (c) Fafb. (d) Fafc.
TABLE VI
PERFORMANCES AFTER DISCARDING SEVERAL DCT COEFFICIENTS
TABLE VII
FOUR PROBE SUBSETS AND THEIR EVALUATION TASK
only normalized frontal face images are used in this experi-
ment and the training samples for each class are limited, the
subclustering process is skipped. The cumulative match curves
for four probe sets are, respectively, shown in Fig. 11. (For the
PCA approach, 50 components are used. For the DCT FLD
approach, 70 DCT coefficients are used and the dimensionality
of the feature vectors is also 50 after implementing the FLD).
From the cumulative match curves of the four different probe
sets, we can see that the performance is improved by discarding
687
the first three DCT low-frequency coefficients because illumi-
nation variations are reduced. The histogram equalization in the
preprocessing procedure can only deal with uniform illumina-
tion. However, by discarding several low-frequency DCT coef-
ficients, both uniform and nonuniform illumination variations
can be reduced. We can see from Fig. 11(d) that the perfor-
mance of PCA is greatly improved by discarding the first three
components. However, in other probe sets, the performance be-
comes even worse without the first three components. Because
the PCA is a statistical approach which is data dependent, the
first three components are not necessarily related to illumina-
tion variations. It depends on the training and testing sets. We
can see from the experimental results that only the probe set Fafc
with large illumination changes will get better performance by
discarding the first three components. It should be highlighted
that low-frequency DCT coefficients are mainly associated with
illumination variations for the face image without hair. There-
fore, discarding several low-frequency coefficients will only re-
duce the illumination variations but not ruin some facial fea-
tures. It should be noted that we do not compare our feature
extraction approach with all other available approaches tested
688
Fig. 12. Cumulative match curves (D-LDA). (a) Dup1. (b) Dup2. (c) Fafb. (d) Fafc.
on the FERET database and we do not claim that our approach
achieve the best performance on the FERET database. The main
objective of this experiment is to show that the performance is
indeed improved by discarding the first several low-frequency
DCT coefficients. Moreover, compared with the baseline PCA
approach, our approach performs better on the four probe sets
and the computational cost is greatly reduced.
Recently, a variant of FLD (LDA) called direct LDA
(D-LDA) has been proposed to solve the small sample size
problem instead of using the PCA FLD scheme [8]. This
method is used to discard the null space of the between-class
scatter matrix rather than discarding the null space of the
within-class scatter matrix. The D-LDA can also be employed
in our system after implementing the DCT for dimensionality
reduction. As illustrated in Fig. 12, our empirical study on the
FERET database shows that the D-LDA does not achieve better
performance than the DCT D-LDA (The numbers in the
figure legend represent the number of DCT coefficients kept).
In addition, similar to the results obtained in Section IV-A,
more DCT coefficients do not necessarily correspond to better
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, MAY 2005
performance because there will be more irrelevant and unstable
information. Moreover, the D-LDA is more computationally
expensive than the DCT D-LDA or DCT FLD method. It
should be noted that in our experiment, the best performance
of DCT D-LDA is obtained when the number of DCT
coefficients is close to the largest number of DCT coefficients
that the DCT FLD method can keep and the DCT D-LDA
achieves similar results as the DCT FLD method.
C. Testing on the Yale Database
We further test our proposed approach on the Yale database
which contains 165 frontal face images covering 15 individuals
taken under 11 different conditions. Each individual has dif-
ferent facial expressions (happy, sad, winking, sleepy, and sur-
prised), illumination conditions (center-light, left-light, right-
light) and small occlusion (with glasses). In order to be consis-
tent with the experiments of [5], the centered face images of the
normalized Yale face database and their closely cropped images
CHEN et al.: HIGH-SPEED FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON DCT AND RBF NEURAL NETWORKS
= 0.1)
Fig. 13. Examples of the centered Yale images.
Fig. 14. Examples of the closely cropped Yale images.
TABLE VIII
COMPARISON ON THE YALE DATABASE
are used in our experiment.1 Examples of the centered Yale im-
ages and the closely cropped Yale images are shown in Figs. 13
and 14, respectively.
For the Yale face database, our system is also tested by using
the “leaving-one-out” strategy which was used in [5]. In order to
fairly evaluate different feature extraction methods, the nearest
neighbor classifier was used for classification. We also skip the
subclustering process since only frontal normalized face images
are used. Comparative results are shown in Table VIII. The results
of the Eigenface (PCA) and Fisherface in our experiment are
not identical to the results shown in [5]. This is mainly due to
little different cropping size and normalization. Nevertheless, the
results are very close. By discarding the first three coefficients,
the DCT achieves better performance because variations due to
lighting are reduced. However, if the FLD is further applied to the
DCT feature vectors, discarding the first three coefficients will
not improve the performance significantly because the FLD also
discounts illumination variations. We can see from Table VIII
that our feature extraction method achieves similar performance
compared to the Fisherface method. However, the main advan-
tage of our method is its low computational load which is crucial
for high-speed face recognition in large databases. If we use the
proposed RBF neural networks for classification, our system
achieves better performance (see Table IX).
1The normalized Yale face database can be obtained from http://www-
white.media.mit.edu/vismod/classes/mas622-00/datasets/
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TABLE IX
PERFORMANCE ON THE YALE DATABASE (
V. CONCLUSION
This paper presents a high-speed face recognition method
based on the techniques of DCT, FLD, and RBF neural net-
works. Facial features are first extracted by the DCT which
greatly reduces dimensionality of the original face image as
well as maintains the main facial features. Compared with the
well-known PCA approach, the DCT has the advantages of data
independency and fast computational speed. Besides, we have
explored another property of DCT. It turns out that by simply dis-
carding the first DCT coefficient, the proposed system is robust
against uniform brightness variations of images. Furthermore,
by discarding the first few low-frequency DCT coefficients, the
effect of nonuniform illumination can be alleviated. In order to
obtain the most invariant and discriminating feature of faces, the
linear projection method FLD is further applied to the feature
vectors. Before implementing the FLD, we propose a clustering
algorithm to prevent training samples with large variations
from being clustered in the same class. This process guarantees
optimal projection direction for the FLD as well as determines
the number of hidden neurons of the RBF neural networks for
classification. After the FLD is applied, there are no overlaps
between classes and the architecture and parameters of RBF
neural networks are determined according to the distribution
properties of the training samples. Simulation results on three
benchmark face databases show that our system achieves high
training and recognition speed, as well as high recognition rate.
More importantly, it is insensitive to illumination variations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank those researchers who have
kindly provided the public face databases such as ORL, FERET,
and Yale etc. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous
reviewers for their valuable comments.
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Meng Joo Er (S’82–M’87) received the B.Eng.
and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from
the National University of Singapore, in 1985 and
1988, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in systems
engineering from the Australian National University,
Canberra, in 1992.
From 1987 to 1989, he worked as a Research
and Development Engineer in Chartered Electronics
Industries Pte, Ltd., Singapore, and a Software
Engineer in Telerate Research and Development Pte,
Ltd., Singapore, respectively. He is currently Director
of the Intelligent Systems Center, a University Research Centre cofunded
by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Engineering
Technologies, Ltd., and an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering (EEE), NTU. His research interests include control
theory and applications, robotics, and automation, fuzzy logic and neural
networks, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, parallel computing,
power electronics and drives, and digital signal processors applications. He
has authored a book entitled Dynamic Fuzzy Neural Networks: Architectures,
Algorithms, and Applications (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003), seven book
chapters, and numerous published works in his research areas of interest.
Dr. Er was the winner the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES)
Prestigious Publication (Application) Award in 1996 and IES Prestigious
Publication (Theory) Award in 2001. In recognition of his outstanding research
work as a promising young academic staff member, he was awarded a
Commonwealth Fellowship tenable at the University of Strathclyde, U.K.,
in 2000. Due to his excellent performance in teaching, he received the
Teacher of the Year Award for the School of EEE in 1999. In 1998, he
was invited as a Guest Researcher at the Precision Instrument Development
Center of National Science Council, Taiwan. He was invited as a Panelist to
the IEEE-INNS-ENNS International Conference on Neural Networks held
in Como, Italy, in 2000. He served as the Editor of the IES Journal on
Electronics and Computer Engineering from 1995 to 2004. Currently, he
serves as an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Humanoid
Robotics and an Associate Editor of Neurocomputing, respectively. He is a
Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer
Research. He served as a Member of the International Scientific Committee
of the International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications, and
Computers (CSC) in 1998. He was a Member of the International Scientific
Committee of a unique three conferences series on Soft Computing consisting
of the 2001 World Scientific and Engineering Society (WSES) International
Conference on Neural Networks and Applications, the 2001 WSES International
Conference on Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Systems, and the 2001 WSES International
Conference on Evolutionary Computation. He was invited to serve as the
General Chairman of four WSES International Conferences, namely the
International Conference on Robotics, Distance Learning, and Intelligent
Communications Systems (RODLICS) organized by WSES and cosponsored
by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the International Conference
on Speech, Signal, and Image Processing 2001 (SSIP’2001), the International
Conference on Multimedia, Internet, Video Technologies (MIV’2001), and
the International Conference on Simulation (SIM’2001) held in Malta in
2001. He also served as a Member of the International Program Committee
on the International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics, and
Autonomous Systems (CIRAS’2001) held in Singapore in 2001. Moreover,
he served as a CoChairman of the Keynotes/Workshop Sub-Committee, the
Asian Control Conference, held in Singapore in 2002. He also served as the
General Chair of two 2002 WSEAS International Conferences, namely the
2002 WSEAS International Conference on Electronics, Control, and Signal
Processing (ECS’2002) and the 2002 WSEAS International Conference on
E-ACTIVITIES in Singapore. He became the first Singapore citizen to be
invited to serve as a Member of the Board of Directors of WSEAS. He has also
been very active in organizing international conferences. He was a member
of the main organizing committees of International Conference on Control,
Automation, Robotics, and Vision (ICARCV) for six consecutive terms (1994,
1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004) and the Asian Conference on Computer
Vision (ACCV) in 1995. He was the Co-Chairman of Technical Programme
Committee and Person-in-Charge of Invited Sessions for ICARCV’96 and
ICARCV’98. He was in charge of International Liaison for ICARCV’2000
and was Technical Program Chair for ICARCV’2002. He served as the
General Chair of ICARCV’2004.
CHEN et al.: HIGH-SPEED FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON DCT AND RBF NEURAL NETWORKS 691

Weilong Chen received the B.S. degree in automatic Shiqian Wu (M’02) received the B.S. and M.Eng.
control engineering from Southeast University, degrees from Huazhong University of Science and
Nanjing, China, in 1999. He is currently pursuing the Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1985 and 1988, re-
Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronics engineering spectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and elec-
at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. tronic engineering from Nanyang Technological Uni-
His research interests are in pattern recognition, versity, Singapore, in 2001.
computer vision, and neural networks. He is currently a Research Scientist in the De-
partment of Human Centric Media, Institute for
Infocomm Research, Singapore. From 1988 to 1997,
he was a Lecturer and then became as Associate
Professor at the Huazhong University of Science
and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China. From 2000 to 2002, he served as
a Research Engineer and then Research Fellow in the Center for Signal
Processing, Singapore. In 2002, he was an Associate Research Staff in the
Laboratories for Information Technology, Singapore. He has published more
than 30 international journal and conference papers. He is a coauthor of a
book entitled Dynamic Fuzzy Neural Networks: Architectures, Algorithms and
Applications (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). Currently, his research interests
include fuzzy systems, neural networks, computer vision, pattern recognition,
face detection and recognition, and infrared image analysis.