Optimal KAZE and AKAZE Features for Facial Similarity Matching.

Face Recognition is one of the premier disciplines in the vast field of computer vision and image analysis. A popular method is the Gaussian scale space analysis which limits the performance by smoothing both the noise and natural boundaries in the same proportion. In order to prevent the loss of natural boundaries to smoothing we tap into nonlinear scale space techniques such as KAZE and Accelerated KAZE. KAZE is a multistage 2-D feature detection and description algorithm. It makes use of AOS schemes to develop the nonlinear scale space for analysis. Though the results are satisfactory, it is computationally intense as they solve a humongous module of linear equations. To ascertain the mentioned limitation of KAZE we make use of Accelerated-KAZE, which uses pyramidal structure with Fast Explicit Diffusion incorporated in it, thus minimizing the computation in the step of feature detection of nonlinear scale space. Also, with the use of M-LDB (Modified-Local Difference Binary) descriptor the problem of rotation is solved. Usage of RANSAC after processing in two methods had some disadvantages. It gave bad results when the inliers ratio in the dataset is low. Thus, Optimal RANSAC is employed which works well even when the inliers ratio is as low as 5%. The proposed methods are tested on many standard datasets and various performance parameters.