Specific sensors for face recognition

This paper describes an association of original hardware solutions associated to adequate software software for human face recognition. A differential CMOS imaging system [1] and a Synchronized flash camera [2] have been developed to provide ambient light invariant images and facilitate segmentation of the face from the background. This invariance of face image demonstrated by our prototype camera systems can result in a significant software/hardware simplification in such biometrics applications especially on a mobile platform where the computation power and memory capacity are both limited. In order to evaluate our prototypes we have build a face database of 25 persons with 4 different illumination conditions. These solutions with appropriate cameras give a significant improvement in performance (on the normal CCD cameras) using a simple correlation based algorithm associated with an adequate preprocessing. Finally, we have obtained a promising results using fusion between different sensors.