Analysis of the Performance of Eigenfaces Technique in Recognizing Non-Caucasian Faces

Facial detection and recognition technologies are rapidly becoming an important area in many computer systems ranging from system security and biometric authentication to online social networks. However, despite of many years of research, a perfect solution to facial detection and recognition has yet not been found. As one of the earliest techniques, Eigenfaces had become one of the most popular benchmarks in this field. The technique itself, though far from providing a perfect solution, had been used by researchers to compare their proposed algorithms. The authors’ observation of the literature on and surrounding the area of facial detection and recognition found that there is a severe lack of tests and comparison of these techniques on non-Caucasian facial images. This paper aims to provide some lights into this vacuity and to assess the performance of the benchmark technique using non-Caucasian face databases