A face authentication system for mobile devices: Optimization techniques

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study of the implementation of a face authentication system for mobile devices. Our system is based on a widely adopted face recognition technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The execution time of the baseline system on a PDA is unacceptably slow - a typical authentication session takes more than 30 seconds. To make real-time face authentication possible on mobile devices, optimization is needed. In our study, extensive profiling is done to pinpoint the execution hotspots in the system. Based on the profiling results, our optimization strategy focused on replacing the large amount of slow floating point calculations with their fixed-point versions. Range estimation is also carried out to determine the range of floating point values that must be accommodated by the final, fixed-point version of our system. Compared with the baseline system, experimental results indicate that our optimized system runs as much as 47 times faster for PCA projection. Using the optimized system, a complete authentication session takes only 5 seconds. Real time face authentication for mobile device is achieved with no significant loss in recognition accuracy. © 2005 SPIE and IS&T.