Better than best: matching score based face registration

For most face recognition systems, proper registration of the faces to a common coordinate system is of great importance to obtain acceptable performance. Generally, for this purpose, landmarks are selected that can be located reliably, like the centres of the eyes, the tip of the nose and the centre or corners of the mouth. Many of the published results of face recognition methods are based on registration using manually selected landmarks, which is often regarded as the ��?gold standard��?. In this paper we show that using a matching score based registration approach, we can significantly improve upon face identification and verification results obtained using registration with manual landmarks. For recognition using PCA/Mahanalobis Cosine, we obtained up to 9% improvement in identification rate on the FERET data base.