Novel multispectral face descriptor using orthogonal walsh codes

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel high-performance multispectral local descriptor that uses orthogonal Walsh codes during the generation of the discriminative feature set. Rotational variance and noise are compelling factors that significantly affect the distinctive performance of a facial identifier. The descriptor proposed in this article handles these challenges favourably sacrificing any distinctive performance. Orthogonal Walsh codes are used during the generation of the local descriptor. A Walsh code is assigned to each neighbour of a reference pixel. Before the assignment of an orthogonal code to each neighbouring pixel, these pixels are sorted in ascending order that consolidates the robustness of the method against rotational variances. Almost all methods proposed so far focus on grayscale images. However, colour bands contain important information about the relationship between pixels. Therefore, authors' method considers RGB colour bands of pixels to improve distinctive performance. The results of extensive simulations show the remarkable and competitive performance of the proposed method regarding recognition accuracy and robustness against rotational variances as well as noise effects.