An embedded HMM-based approach for face detection and recognition

Abstract

We describe an embedded hidden Markov model (HMM)-based approach for face detection and recognition that uses an efficient set of observation vectors obtained from the 2D-DCT coefficients. The embedded HMM can model the two dimensional data better than the one-dimensional HMM and is computationally less complex than the two-dimensional HMM. This model is appropriate for face images since it exploits an important facial characteristic: frontal faces preserve the same structure of "super states" from top to bottom, and also the same left-to-right structure of "states" inside each of these "super states".