Automatic Face Recognition from Video

The objective of this work is to automatically recognize faces from video sequences in a realistic, unconstrained setup in which illumination conditions are extreme and greatly changing, viewpoint and user motion pattern have a wide variability, and video input is of low quality. At the centre of focus are face appearance manifolds: this thesis presents a significant advance of their understanding and application in the sphere of face recognition. The two main contributions are the Generic Shape-Illumination Manifold recognition algorithm and the Anisotropic Manifold Space clustering. The Generic Shape-Illumination Manifold is evaluated on a large data corpus acquired in real-world conditions and its performance is shown to greatly exceed that of state-of-the-art methods in the literature and the best performing commercial software. Empirical evaluation of the Anisotropic Manifold Space clustering on a popular situation comedy is also described with excellent preliminary results.