Performance comparison among complex wavelet transforms based face recognition systems

In this paper we investigate the recently developed dual tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) and the single tree wavelet transform (ST-CWT) and compared them with Gabor wavelet transform for the face recognition problem. Experiments are carried out on standard databases. The resulting feature vectors of complex wavelets were applied to PCA and LDA for dimensionality reduction. In all experiments, complex wavelets equaled or surpassed the performance of Gabor wavelets in recognition rate when equal number of orientations and scales are used. Moreover, generally ST-CWT results outperformed DT-CWT. Obtained results indicate that complex wavelets can provide a successful alternative to Gabor wavelets for face recognition both using PCA and LDA. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.