Histogram of the oriented gradient for face recognition

The histogram of oriented gradient has been successfully applied in many research fields with excellent performance especially in pedestrian detection. However, the method has rarely been applied to face recognition. Aimed to develop a fast and efficient new feature for face recognition, the original HOG and its variations were applied to evaluate the effects of different factors. An information theory-based criterion was also developed to evaluate the potential classification power of different features. Comparative experiments show that even with a relatively simple feature descriptor, the proposed HOG feature achieves almost the same recognition rate with much lower computational time than the widely used Gabor feature on the FRGC and CAS-PEAL databases. © 2011 Tsinghua University Press.