Abstract: Face sketch recognition plays an important role in determining the identity of the suspect through suspect sketch which is described by witnesses. In order to better realize face sketch recognition, a new face sketch synthesis and recognition algorithm was proposed based on face independent subspace and shape features. According to the face reconstruction based on independent component analysis (ICA) subspace, the face sketch synthesis based on ICA was studied, and the conversion between photo and sketch was realized. Considering the important role of the face structure information in face recognition and in analyzing the limitation of the structural information extracted by active shape model (ASM) algorithm, the polar shape model (PSM) was proposed. Finally, the synthesised sketch was recognized with the one to be recognized by combining ICA/linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and PSM. Experiment results indicate that the synthesis sketch performs very well by new algorithm, the recognition rate of one rank is 947%, and the recognition rate of ten rank is 991%. Recognition with subspace and PSM, one rank rate can be increased by 53%, and the first three rank rate can be increased by 42% evenly. The algorithm has higher recognition rate and basically meets the requirements of automatic face sketch recognition system.

Key words: sketch synthesis, sketch recognition, independent component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, active shape model, polar shape model