Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx

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Computer and Information Sciences
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An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and curvelet

transform
Suparna Biswas ⇑,1, Jaya Sil 1
Dept. of Computer Science & Technology, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, P.O. Botanic Garden, Howrah 711 103, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In the paper we propose a novel method for face recognition using contourlet transform (CNT) and cur-
Received 22 March 2017 velet transform (CLT) which improves rate of face recognition under different challenges. We obtain
Revised 19 October 2017 smooth contour information along different directions by applying CNT on the face image while CLT hav-
Accepted 29 October 2017
ing multiscale, multidirectional and anisotropic properties has been employed to represent the edges
Available online xxxx
more prominently. Pre-processed training images are decomposed up to fourth level using CNT and coef-
ficients of directional subbands are analysed to obtain the features from the images. In another approach
Keywords:
CLT has been applied on the pre-processed face images and considering scale of four and angle eight, dif-
Contourlet transform
Curvelet transform
ferent statistical features are extracted from the detail subbands. Finally, we integrate the features
Classification obtained from two approaches. High dimensionality of feature space has been reduced by selecting
Face recognition important features depending on the entropy of the transform coefficients. Selected features are applied
Dimensionality reduction to recognize the face images using support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experimental results show
that the proposed feature extraction method improves recognition accuracy compare to other methods
and efficiently handle the effect of Gaussian noise as tested on JAFFE, ORL and FERET database.
Ó 2017 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction
In recent years biometric based techniques have been emerged
as the most promising option for recognizing individuals. Face
recognition offers certain advantages over other biometric meth-
ods, such as fingerprints, iris, retina and hand geometry, mainly
for two reasons. Firstly the facial images can easily be acquired
from a distance and secondly, face images can be collected without
any prior knowledge.
Face recognition is challenging in the field of pattern recogni-
tion and computer vision for dealing with the images having pose
variation, illumination differences and different expressions. Efficient
recognition algorithms with appropriate image pre-processing
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: suparna_b80@yahoo.co.in (Suparna Biswas), js@cs.iiests.ac.in
(J. Sil).
1 Wang et al. (2008) develop an efficient face recognition method
Formerly, Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur P.O. Botanic
Garden, Howrah 711 103, India.
Peer review under responsibility of King Saud University.
Production and hosting by Elsevier
methods may able to reduce the effect of noise, pose variations
and illumination differences in the images. An automatic face
recognition method consists of two steps: (i) feature extraction
and (ii) design of classifier. However, classification outcome largely
depends on the facial feature extraction methods.
Different methods both in spatial and frequency domains have
been developed to extracting the features from the face images for
person recognition. Recently to analyze the high dimensional sig-
nals a theory has been proposed named as multiscale geometric
analysis (MGA). Different MGA tools like curvelet (CLT) (Starck
et al., 2002; Mandal et al., 2007), bandlet and contourlet (CNT)
(Xu and Zhang, 2009; Yu et al., 2005) are proposed for feature gen-
eration and data compression as well. N.G.Chitaliya and A.I.Trivedi
describe contourlet and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based
method (Chitaliya and Trivedi, 2010) for feature extraction and
dimensionality reduction in face recognition. They show that the
proposed method performs better than the wavelet transforms.
based on CNT and SVM. Huang et al. (2010) build a face recognition
method based on illumination invariant features in CNT domain
and the results they obtained are effective and competitive with
respect to other methods. In Chitaliya and Trivedi (2010), author
proposes an efficient face recognition technique by combining
CLT for feature extraction and PCA for dimension reduction. Here

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
1319-1578/Ó 2017 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
2 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
reduced coefficients are used as feature vectors to recognize the
images more accurately. Yan et al. (2008) present an image com-
pression and feature extraction technique by utilizing CNT to
develop a wireless based face recognition system.
Face recognition is quite difficult under differences in illumina-
tion, specifically for single image based recognition system. The
effective solution is the extraction of illumination invariant fea-
tures to classify the images (Xie et al., 2010). Veni et al. (2013) pro-
pose an illumination invariant feature extraction technique in
contourlet domain for recognizing faces. Ant colony optimization
algorithm (Veni et al., 2013) has been applied to capture the
important geometrical structures of face images by reducing the
feature dimensionality. Finally, in the work the graph matching
algorithm is used for face recognition. Chun-nian (2012) propose
a non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) based technique
to deal with the problem of illumination variation. At first NSCT
is applied to each face image in order to obtain low frequency
and high frequency subbands. Subbands are denoised and his-
togram equalization is applied to the low frequency components.
Finally, illumination invariant image is obtained by inverse non-
subsampled contourlet transform (INSCT). CLT is another multires-
olution tool, developed by Candes and Donoho (2000) has better
ability to represent the edges and other singularities along the
curves. T. Mandal et al. present a PCA and Curvelet based face
recognition method (Mandal and Wu, 2008) and provides compar-
ative study with wavelet and PCA techniques.
Some of the recent works on face recognition are DWT Dual-
subband Frequency domain Feature Extraction (DDFFE) 9 (Ajit
Krisshna et al., 2014), Vector Quantization (VQ) in a Transform
Domain (Alobaidi et al., 2016), Symbolic Modeling of Polar FFT fea-
tures (Angadi and Kagawade, 2017), particle swarm optimization-
gravitational search algorithm (PSO-GSA) (Dora et al., 2017), sparse
fingerprint classification algorithm (SFCA) (Larrain et al., 2017) and
Two-Step Feature Extraction in a Transform Domain (Alobaidi and
Mikhael, 2017). The DDFFE (Ajit Krisshna et al., 2014) technique is
used for efficient extraction of pose, translation and illumination
invariant features by combining the DWT (Discrete Wavelet Trans-
form), DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform), and DCT (Discrete Cosine
Transform). Here a Threshold-Based Binary Particle Swarm Opti-
mization (ThBPSO) feature selection technique is used to improve
the performance of a face recognition system. In Alobaidi et al.
(2016) a technique is proposed for face recognition which combines
DCT and VQ. This method improves the storage requirements and
the recognition rates. A spectral domain based feature extraction
algorithm has been proposed in Angadi and Kagawade (2017) where
the magnitude of 2D-DFT coefficients are computed using polar
fourier transform technique. The maximum value of the magnitude
is considered as a feature value. The extracted feature value is used
to construct a symbolic object for representing the face image and
performs well under the variations of expression, illumination and
inclusion of occlusion. Gabor filter banks have been used for extract-
ing features in face recognition from the last few decades. In Dora
et al. (2017) a hybrid PSO-GSA algorithm is proposed to overcome
the problem of computational complexity of Gabor filter based
approaches. The proposed method (Dora et al., 2017) works well
for frontal and pose variant face images. In Larrain et al. (2017), a
grid of patches is extracted from each face image to form the repre-
sentative dictionaries and every patch is transformed into a binary
sparse representation and created a fingerprint of each face. The
SFCA algorithm is able to deal with the variations of pose, lighting,
expressions, occlusion, face size and distance from the camera when
the size of the data set is small or medium. A face recognition system
with two-step Feature Extraction phase is presented in Alobaidi and
Mikhael (2017). A new method is proposed, which enhances the DCT
discrimination power by selecting coefficients that have maximum
variation across persons of each pose. The overall system
Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
performance improvement has been achieved by using a
two-input SVM classifier.
In the paper, a novel face recognition method based on CNT and
CLT has been proposed by extracting features from the trans-
formed domain, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the proposed
method provides a mechanism for capturing information, which
is judicious mixture of detail and average information content of
image components. Secondly, the compressed information in the
transformed domain reduces dimensionality of the feature space,
which effectively reduces complexity of the recognition method.
We focus on extracting statistical features of directional subbands
from the coefficients of CNT and detail subbands in case of CLT in
order to analyse the face images based on their information con-
tent. Using CNT, smooth contour information in different direc-
tions is obtained, relevant to accurate recognition of the pose
invariant face images. On the other hand, the CLT has better ability
to represent the edges of the images and other singularities along
the curves, therefore employed in the work to extract the features
for face recognition. However, all the extracted features may not be
equally important and so the features are ranked using entropy
measure for feature selection. The threshold is determined experi-
mentally to select the most relevant features and using SVM clas-
sifier the face images are recognized. The experimental results
demonstrate good performance of the proposed method on pub-
licly available data set ORL, JAFFE and FERET.
Rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents
mathematical preliminaries of CNT and CLT methods and Section 3
describes the proposed face recognition method. In Section 4
experimental results are presented with explanation while
Section 5 concludes the paper.
2. Mathematical preliminaries
2.1. Contourlet transform
In 2000 Candes and Donoho (2000) introduced CNT as a simple
directional extension of wavelets. Wavelets are not effective to
represent the images with smooth contours in different directions.
Directionality and anisotropy properties are handled by CNT by
providing multiscale and directional decomposition. Burt and
Adelson (1983) introduced Laplacian Pyramid (LP) structure for
multiscale decomposition of images.
At each level LP scheme generates down-sampled low pass ver-
sion of original image and the difference between the original and
the low pass image, resulting a band pass image. Then the obtained
band pass image is further processed through directional filter
bank (DFB). DFB contains the high frequency information like
smooth contour and edge information of images. It is implemented
by k-level binary tree decomposition method followed by 2k direc-
tional subbands where k is a positive integer. Combination of LP
and DFB provides the double filter bank structure, which is known
as CNT.
The CNT consists of two main steps: Laplacian Pyrarmid (LP)
and Directional Filter Banks (DFB), as shown in Fig. 1. First the
input face image is divided into low pass image and band pass
image, and then each band pass image is further decomposed by
DFB. For the next level of decomposition, first low pass image is
down-sampled and passed through the same double filter bank
structure. Thus the same structure is repeated for each next level
of decomposition.
2.2. Curvelet transform
Curvelet is a multidirectional and multiscale transform which
represents edges and other singularities along the curves better
 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 3

Fig. 1. Decomposition scheme of CNT.

Fig. 2. Curvelet tiling of space and frequency.

than other multiscale transforms. Implementation steps of
Fast Digital curvelet transform via wrapping are discussed in
Cands et al. (2006). To implement Curvelet transform (CLT), first
Two Dimensional Fast Fourier transform (2DFFT) of the image is
taken and then the 2D Fourier frequency plane is divided into
parabolic wedges. Next Inverse FFT (IFFT) of each wedge is applied
at each scale j and angle l. The division of wedges in the Fourier
frequency plane is shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3 shows the curvelet
coefficients for scale j ¼ 2 and number of angle l ¼ 8.
smoothing filter for noise removal. Histogram equalization is used
to remove illumination differences in the image and the prepro-
cessed image is now ready for subband calculation. Next the pro-
posed entropy based subband selection procedure has been
applied to select the most important subbands, which effectively
reduces the dimension of the feature vector. Finally, using a classi-
fier the face image is recognized, which is close to the image pre-
sent in the image database.

3. Proposed framework 3.1. Subband calculation

The proposed framework creates a novel feature space by
extracting features in temporal domain using contourlet transform
(CNT) and curvelet transform (CLT) in order to improve rate of face
recognition under different challenges. The computational com-
plexity of the discrete contourlet transform is Oðn2 Þ for ðn  nÞ
images and for CLT the computational complexity is Oðn2 lognÞ. So
the total computational complexity for our algorithm is (Oðn2 Þ
+Oðn2 lognÞ), i.e. Oðn2 lognÞ because 1 is negligible w.r.t. logn where
n = 128. Schematic overview of the proposed framework is illus-
trated in Fig. 4.
In the proposed face recognition method, initially as the prepro-
cessing step the input image is passed through the Gaussian
Coefficients of CNT and CLT subbands are used as extracted fea-
tures. In contourlet domain, each preprocessed image has been
decomposed using CNT up to 4th level. It has been observed from
Fig. 5 that the image is decomposed into 21 directions at the first
level, 22 at the second level, 23 at the third level and 24 at the
4th level. Thus we obtain 30 i.e. (21 þ 22 þ 23 þ 24 ) directional sub-
bands for each training image. In the experiments, for each face
image we choose four levels to achieve maximum recognition rate.
In CNT, PKVA filter (Phoong et al., 1995) is used as LP and DFB.
Similarly to obtain the CLT based features each preprocessed
face image is decomposed into 4 scale and angle 8 and coefficients
of 24 detail subbands are obtained as shown in Fig. 6.

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curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
4 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx

Fig. 3. curvelet transform of face images: (a) Original image, (b) Approximation coefficients, (c)–(j) are detail coefficients.

It has been observed from Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 that the average
entropy of six directional subbands (3, 7, 14, 15, 19, 30) are below
the threshold, experimentally determined as 1. So we remove six
subbands out of 30 directional subbands and selected 24 subbands
for generating the feature vectors.
In CLT domain, considering scale of 3 and angle 8, entropy of 24
different detail subbands at different levels are calculated over ORL
and JAFFE databases and average entropy is plotted in Fig. 9 and
Fig. 10, respectively. It has been observed that the average entropy
of four directional subbands (1, 2, 5, 6) are below the experimen-
tally selected threshold 1.2. So we remove four subbands out of
24 directional subbands and selected 20 subbands for generating
the feature vectors.
After subband selection in contourlet and curvelet domain, we
combine the selected subbands (24 + 20 = 44) and obtain the fea-
tures using 44 subbands.

3.3. Feature extraction

Fig. 4. Flow diagram of proposed face recognition. method
3.2. Subband selection
In order to reduce the dimension of the feature vectors to train
the classifier, entropy of each detail subbands are calculated. A
threshold is determined experimentally to select the important
subbands which are used for feature extraction. Entropy is a statis-
tical measure of randomness of an image, which is used to charac-
terize the texture of an image. Entropy is calculated as:
X more pixels) statistics. The first order statistics estimate proper-
E ¼  ci log 2 ðci Þ
i
where ci represents the histogram counts of ith bin. In our experi-
ment, after taking CNT up to fourth level the entropy of 30 different
directional subbands at different levels are calculated using the
images of ORL and JAFFE databases and average entropy is plotted
in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8, respectively.
In the work features are extracted from temporal domain
based on the statistical characteristics of the coefficients. The idea
has been adopted from the spatial domain face recognition meth-
ods where statistical features are often used (El-Khamy et al.,
2001; Das et al., 2017). In spatial domain, statistical analysis
reveals the relationships between the gray levels of pixels in an
image. The spatial distribution of gray values are used to compute
the local descriptors at each point in the image and image statis-
tics are calculated from the distributions of the local descriptors.
The statistical methods can be classified into first order (one
pixel), second order (pair of pixels) and higher order (three or
ð1Þ
ties (e.g. average and variance) of individual pixel values by keep-
ing aside the spatial interaction between the pixels. The second
and higher order statistics estimate relationship between two or
more pixel gray level values occurring at specific locations with
respect to each other, like co-occurrence or co-variance matrix.
These different statistical measures are used in a wide range
of scientific and social research, including: biostatistics,

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 5

Fig. 5. Decomposition of Image using Contourlet transform up to 4th level.

Fig. 6. Curvelet transform of face image: (a) Original image, (b)–(y) are 24 detail coefficients.
PM PN
computational sociology, network biology, social science and in y¼1 Iðx; yÞ
Mean ðlÞ ¼
x¼1
social research etc. Here we use statistical measures applied ð2Þ
MN
on the coefficients to study the effect of the transform domain
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
features in face recognition. PM PN
y¼1 ðIðx; yÞ  lÞ
2

Standard Dev iation ðrÞ ¼

Statistical measures are employed on each 24 directional sub- x¼1
ð3Þ
bands of CNT and 20 detail subbands of CLT, using following equa- MN
tions to obtain the feature set F1. Feature set F1 consists of PM PN 2
statistical parameters mean (l), standard deviation (r), energy x¼1 y¼1 I ðx; yÞ
Energy ðeÞ ¼ ð4Þ
(e), skewness (s) and kurtosis (k). MN

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
6 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx

Fig. 7. Entropy for directional subbands up to 4th level (nlevels = [1,2,3,4]) for ORL.

Fig. 8. Entropy for directional subbands up to 4th level (nlevels= [1,2,3,4]) for JAFFE database.

Fig. 9. Entropy of 24 detail subbands for ORL database.

PM PN
x¼1 y¼1 ðIðx; yÞ  lÞ3 Variables M and N denote number of rows and columns of the
Skewness ðsÞ ¼ ð5Þ
MN 2 r subband images and Iðx; yÞ is the coefficient of row and column
in subbands. We extract F1 with (24  5) 120 features from the
PM PN
x¼1 y¼1 ðIðx; yÞ  lÞ4 subbands of CNT and 100 (5  20Þ features from the CLT subbands
Kurtosis ðkÞ ¼ ð6Þ after entropy based subband selection method.
MN 4 r

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 7

Fig. 10. Entropy of 24 detail subbands for JAFFE database.

Table 1
Feature details. 4. Experimental results
Total subbands Selected bands Feature vector dimension
The proposed face recognition method has been tested on three
30 (using CNT) 24 120
24 (using CLT) 20 100
publicly available face image databases. The first one is JAFFE data-
54 (CNT + CLT) 44 220 base which contains 230 images of 7 different facial expressions of
Japanese female models. The JAFFE database consists of 10 persons
with 23 images per person. The facial expressions of two Japanese
females are shown in Fig. 11. The JAFFE database has been selected
Another set of features, F2 are extracted by analyzing the his- for analyzing face recognition rate under varying facial expres-
togram of each directional subbands at different levels. By his- sions. During experiment with JAFFE database the training set
togram analysis we obtain a score which characterizes has been formed by randomly selecting five images for each person
dissimilarity of the textures among different facial images. For his- and the remaining eighteen images are used for testing.
togram analysis we choose 5 bins, which is sufficient to obtain the The ORL database contains images of 40 individuals, each hav-
maximum recognition rate. So the dimension of F2 feature vector ing 10 different pose variations in images. Few sample images
for CNT is 120 (5  24Þ and the same for CLT is 100 (5  20Þ. Fea- are shown in Fig. 12. The ORL database comprises 400 frontal
ture details are given in Table 1. and near frontal face images where rotation of the face image is
allowed up to 20°. Some of images are with spectacles and varied
facial expressions such as open or closed eyes or smiling or nons-
3.4. Classification miling faces are presented in ORL database. There are also some
variations in the scaling up to 10% and the gray scale images are
Support vector machine (SVM) is applied for classification of normalized to (92  112) size. While experimenting with ORL
face images. The performance of the classifier considering different database our aim is to check the recognition accuracy under lim-
kernel functions and parameters are studied. The C parameter of ited rotations, various expressions and with spectacles. In our
SVM balances between misclassification of training examples and experiment, we have selected randomly six images of each individ-
smoothness of the decision surface. A low C implies smooth deci- ual for training and rest four images for testing.
sion surface, while all training examples are correctly classified In our third experiment we have used FERET database. The
using a high value of C. The best result is obtained when the degree FERET database contains frontal, left or right profile images and
of polynomial is one, standard deviation of the RBF kernel is 15 and could have some variations in pose, expression and lightning.
value of parameter C is one, determined experimentally. FERET database contains 11,338 images of 994 individuals and

Fig. 11. Face images of different Expressions of JAFFE database.

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
8 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Fig. 12. Sample images of ORL face database.
consists of different subsets such as frontal images (fa, fb) of differ-
ent expressions, quarter left (ql), quarter right (qr), profile left (pl),
profile right (pr), half left (hl), half right (hr) and rotated images (ra,
rb, rc). In our experiments we have used frontal, aligned and
images of various pose and different expression (fa, fb, hl, hr subset
images). Sample test images from FERET database are shown in
Fig. 13. For experiment with FERET database fa subset images is
used for training and remaining fb, hl, hr subsets are used for
testing.
Performance of the classifier considering different kernel func-
tions for different databases and feature sets, are shown in Tables
2–7. Result obtained from each of the 100 runs are averaged and
shown in the Tables considering different databases and feature
sets, mentioned in the corresponding Tables. Simulations are done
on MATLAB 2012b, executed on an Intel Core i3-380 M CPU, 2 GB
RAM in Windows 7 platform. Analysing Tables 2–7, we conclude
that the recognition accuracy in case of F1 feature set is better than
the F2 for all the three databases JAFFE, ORL and FERET. F1 feature
set contains statistical information more relevant for entropy
based feature selection compare to F2 feature set. We also observe
that the polynomial functions provide maximum accuracy for most
of the cases. The proposed feature selection technique does not
hamper the recognition accuracy as shown in Tables 2–7. A slight
reduction of recognition rate has been observed in Tables 2–7
while in Table 4 recognition rate increases marginally after feature
reduction step.
The combined features (for 54 subbands) using SVM classifier
provides maximum 97.24% recognition rate for F1 feature set and
97.15% for F2 feature set while tested on JAFFE database. After fea-
ture selection, the SVM classifier produces the best recognition rate
97.19% for F1 feature set and 97.10% for F2 feature set for the JAFFE
database. In case of the ORL database the maximum recognition
rate for combined features is 98.65% for F1 feature set and
98.01% for F2 feature set. But after feature selection SVM classifier
provides maximum accuracy 98.79% for F1 feature set and 98.01%
for F2 feature set. The proposed feature extraction method is also
performed well in case of FERET database and after feature selec-
tion obtained the maximum classification rate 95.71% for F1
Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
feature set and 95.54% for F2 feature set. For all the databases in
comparison with the results obtained before selecting the features
we observe a little variation in recognition rate with the reduced
features.
Comparisons with existing methods are summarized in Tables
8–10. The selected number of training and testing samples, are
same as for the databases JAFFE, ORL and FERET, respectively the
state-of-the-art works considered in the paper for performance
comparison. In Table 8 performance of the proposed method is
compared with the existing methods such as (Wang et al., 2008;
Xu and Zhang, 2009; Mandal and Wu, 2008; Angadi and
Kagawade, 2017; Dora et al., 2017; Ajit Krisshna et al., 2014) for
the ORL database. The proposed method shows improved perfor-
mance over (Wang et al., 2008; Xu and Zhang, 2009; Mandal and
Wu, 2008 and Dora et al., 2017) for both the feature sets F1 and
F2. It is to be noted from Table 8 that the proposed method has bet-
ter performance than (Angadi and Kagawade, 2017) and very
closed to (Ajit Krisshna et al., 2014) for F1 feature set.
Comparisons with the existing methods are summarized in
Table 9 for FERET database. During comparison with (Monzo
et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2005; Schwartz et al., 2012; Ahonen
et al., 2006), fa subset images of FERET database are used as train-
ing set and fb subset are used as test set. In Monzo et al. (2010)
Active Appearance Model (AAM) and Elastic Bunch Graph Match-
ing (EBGM) is used to locate the facial landmarks and then PCA
and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is used to reduce the fea-
ture dimension. Compare to all the techniques (AAM + PCA),
(AAM + LDA), (EBGM + PCA) and (EBGM + LDA) discussed in
Monzo et al. (2010), our method provide better recognition rate.
The results of Table 9 also showing that performance of our tech-
nique is better compare to Zhang et al. (2005) for Fischerface and
(Schwartz et al., 2012). In case of Ahonen et al. (2006) and
Weighted Local Gabor Binary Pattern Histogram Sequence
(LGBPHS) (Zhang et al., 2005) recognition rate is very close to the
proposed technique.
Comparison with the methods (Nagesh and Li, 2009) for two
different classifiers are summarized in Table 10 for the JAFFE data-
base, which exhibits comparable recognition rate for same set of
 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 9

Fig. 13. Sample images from FERET Database.

Table 2
Recognition rate of JAFFE database for F1 feature set.

Feature set Feature vector dimension Linear RBF Polynomial

CNT (30subbands) 150 96.33% 96.67% 96.79%
CLT (24 subbands) 120 95.91% 96.19% 96.24%
(CLT + CNT) 54 bands 270 97.13% 97.24% 97.24%
(CLT + CNT) 44 bands 220 97.10% 97.15% 97.19%

Table 3
Recognition rate of JAFFE database for F2 feature set.

Feature set Feature vector dimension Linear RBF Polynomial

CNT (30subbands) 150 96.28% 96.43% 96.48%
CLT (24 subbands) 120 95.86% 95.98% 96.12%
(CLT + CNT) 54 bands 270 97.03% 97.14% 97.15%
(CLT + CNT) 44 bands 220 97.01% 97.10% 97.10%

Table 4
Recognition rate of ORL database for F1 feature set.

Feature set Feature vector dimension Linear RBF Polynomial

CNT (30subbands) 150 98.43% 98.44% 98.54%
CLT (24 subbands) 120 96.56% 96.65% 96.77%
(CLT + CNT) 54 bands 270 98.61% 98.64% 98.65%
(CLT + CNT) 44 bands 220 98.57% 98.65% 98.79%

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
10 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx

Table 5
Recognition rate of ORL database for F2 feature set.

Feature set Feature vector dimension Linear RBF Polynomial

CNT (30subbands) 150 97.35% 97.35% 97.36%
CLT (24 subbands) 120 96.64% 96.64% 96.69%
(CLT + CNT) 54 bands 270 97.87% 98.01% 98.01%
(CLT + CNT) 44 bands 220 97.73% 97.87% 98.01%

Table 6
Recognition rate of FERET database for F1 feature set.

Feature set Feature vector dimension Linear RBF Polynomial

CNT (30subbands) 150 94.71% 94.71% 94.86%
CLT (24 subbands) 120 94.47% 94.53% 94.67%
(CLT + CNT) 54 bands 270 95.33% 95.77% 95.96%
(CLT + CNT) 44 bands 220 95.34% 95.53% 95.71%

Table 7
Recognition rate of FERET database for F2 feature set.

Feature set Feature vector dimension Linear RBF Polynomial

CNT (30subbands) 150 93.87% 93.82% 93.98%
CLT (24 subbands) 120 93.00% 93.66% 93.70%
(CLT + CNT) 54 bands 270 95.22% 95.75% 95.77%
(CLT + CNT) 44 bands 220 94.72% 95.33% 95.54%

Table 8 (Nagesh and Li, 2009) is at first used for feature extraction, while
Comparison with other methods for ORL database. Sparse representation classifier (SRC) (Wright et al., 2009) is used
Method Recognition rate for classification. The average recognition rate of the proposed
CNT + SVM (Wang et al., 2008) 93.21% method is better than the method (Nagesh and Li, 2009) for both
CNT + SVM (Xu and Zhang, 2009) 97.5% the classifiers B-JSM and SRC as shown in Table 10.
CLT + PCA (Mandal and Wu, 2008) 96.6%
Polar FFT (Angadi and Kagawade, 2017) 98.63%
PSO-GSA (Dora et al., 2017) 97.50% 4.1. Effect of noise
DDFFE (Ajit Krisshna et al., 2014) 98.95%
Proposed Method 98.79% (for F1) The proposed method is applied over various noise levels and
98.01% (for F2) we obtain satisfactory results. Gaussian noise with zero mean
and standard deviation within the range 0.01 and 0.02 are added
to corrupt the images, as shown in Fig. 14. The effect of noise (after
Table 9 feature selection using 44 subbands) with different standard
Comparison with other methods for FERET database.
deviation on recognition rate using three different classifiers are
Method Recognition rate
AAM + PCA (Monzo et al., 2010) 96.57%
AAM + LDA (Monzo et al., 2010) 96.65%
EBGM + PCA (Monzo et al., 2010) 92.32%
EBGM + LDA (Monzo et al., 2010) 97.24%
Fischerface (Zhang et al., 2005) 4.00%
Weighted LGBPHS (Zhang et al., 2005) 98.00%
LBP (Schwartz et al., 2012) 97.00%
Weighted LBP (Ahonen et al., 2006) 98.00%
Proposed method 98.10%, (for F1)
97.79% (for F2)

Table 10
Comparison with other methods for JAFFE database.

Method Recognition rate

S-JSM + B-JSM (Nagesh and Li, 2009) 96.12%
S-JSM + SRC (Nagesh and Li, 2009) 96.01%
Proposed Method 97.19%, (for F1)
97.10% (for F2)

training and testing dataset of Nagesh and Li (2009). In Nagesh and

Li (2009) spatial joint sparsity models (S-JSM) has been applied for
feature extraction and basis joint sparsity model(B-JSM) classifier Fig. 14. (a) Original image, (b) Gaussian noise corrupted image with standard
is used for face recognition. In the second classifier S-JSM deviation 0.01, (c) Gaussian noise corrupted image with standard deviation 0.02.

Please cite this article in press as: Biswas, S.-Q.i.d.n.p.e.m.a.h.b.r.e.m.a.h.b.d.f.t.A.[.B.P.c."./.>., Sil, J. An efficient face recognition method using contourlet and
curvelet transform. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2017.10.010
 Suparna Biswas, J. Sil / Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 11

Table 11 togram analysis. Entropy based subband selection technique for

Effect of noise on ORL database for F1 feature set. feature generation performs well for the databases. Due to low
Standard deviation Linear RBF Polynomial dimension of the feature vectors it can be applied for real time
0.01 97.81% 97.81% 97.84% applications. Comparing our recognition accuracy with other con-
0.02 97.50% 97.61% 97.61% tourlet and curvelet approaches, we claim that our proposed
0.1 97.49% 97.55% 97.57% method performs better than the other techniques. The proposed
0.2 97.01% 97.04% 97.04% method may be extended as follows:

(i) An optimization framework may be developed for the selec-

Table 12 tion of subbands instead of threshold, which provides best
Effect of noise on ORL database for F2 feature set.
recognition accuracy under the different constraint of face
Standard deviation Linear RBF Polynomial recognition.
0.01 97.23% 97.24% 97.23%
0.02 96.84% 96.86% 96.92% (ii) The importance of other statistical measures in the temporal
0.1 96.21% 96.23% 96.86% domain may be studied to improve the rate of face recognition.
0.2 96.09% 96.09% 96.19%

(iii) For real time application compressive sensing based

Table 13 method can be employed for obtaining reduced search space.
Effect of noise on JAFFE database for F1 feature set.

Standard deviation Linear RBF Polynomial

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