Hyperspectral imaging technology with sufficiently discriminative spectral and spatial information brings new opportunities for robust facial image recognition. However, hyperspectral imaging poses several challenges including a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), intra-person misalignment of wavelength bands, and a high data dimensionality. Many studies have proven that both global and local facial features play an important role in face recognition. This research proposed a novel local features extraction algorithm for hyperspectral facial images using local patch based low-rank tensor decomposition that also preserves the neighborhood relationship and spectral dimension information. Additionally, global contour features were extracted using the polar discrete fast Fourier transform (PFFT) algorithm, which addresses many challenges relevant to human face recognition such as illumination, expression, asymmetrical (orientation), and aging changes. Furthermore, an ensemble classifier was developed by combining the obtained local and global features. The proposed method was evaluated by using the Poly-U Database and was compared with other existing hyperspectral face recognition algorithms. The illustrative numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with the best CRC_RLS and PLS methods.

The human face as a biometric trait has been widely used for personal identity verification but it is still a challenging task under uncontrolled conditions. With the development of hyper-spectral imaging acquisition technology, spectral properties with sufficient discriminative information bring new opportunities for a facial image process. This paper presents a novel ensemble method for skin feature segmentation of a hyper-spectral facial image based on a k-means algorithm and a spanning forest algorithm, which exploit both spectral and spatial discriminative features. According to the closed skin area, local features are selected for further facial image analysis. We present the experimental results of the proposed algorithm on various public face databases which achieve higher segmentation rates.