Face recognition: A survey

Face recognition has gained a significant position among most commonly used applications of image processing furthermore availability of viable technologies in this field have contributed a great deal to it. In spite of rapid progress in this field it still has to overcome various challenges like Aging, Partial Occlusion, and Facial Expressions etc affecting the performance of the system, are covered in first part of the survey. This part also highlights the most commonly used databases, available as a standard for face recognition tests. AT & T, AR Database, FERET, ORL and Yale Database have been outlined here. While in the second part of this survey a detailed overview of some important existing methods which are used to dealing the issues of face recognition have been presented. Said methods include Eigenface, Neural Network (NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gabor Wavelet and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). While in last part of the survey several applications of a face recognition system such as video surveillance, Access Control, and Pervasive Computing has been discussed.