Mobile device access control: An improved correlation based face authentication scheme and its Java ME application

This paper investigates face authentication based access control solutions for camera-equipped mobile devices. A new hierarchical correlation based face authentication (HCFA) scheme is proposed, which suits resource-constrained mobile devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants. The idea of HCFA is conducting a partial correlation output peak analysis (analyze the relationship between each cross-correlation output peak generated from selected sub-regions of a face), in conjunction with conventional direct cross-correlation methods. The experimental results on the public domain database demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieved better performance than that of the conventional direct correlation based schemes. Furthermore, HCFA was implemented on the Nokia S60 CLDC emulator using Java ME (previously J2ME) programming technology in order to test the applicability and implementability. The test results show that the proposed algorithm is implementable on mobile devices. It not only shortens processing time but also reduces resource demand significantly, compared with the direct correlation algorithms.