Automatic biometric identification based on face recognition and support vector machines

The object of the present invention is therefore to provide an automatic biometric identification method and system based on face recognition and support vector machines, which mitigate the afore-mentioned problems. This object is achieved by the present invention in that it relates to an automatic biometric identification method and system based on face recognition and support vector machines, as claimed in claims 1 and 28, respectively, and to a computer program product, as claimed in claim 29. In broad outline, the Applicant has found that the afore-mentioned problems can be solved by exploiting a one-class SVM (OC-SVM) for recognizing the face of an authorized user. One of the main advantages of the use of an OC-SVM lies in the fact that, for the training of the OC-SVM, only positive examples of the user are to be used, while the recognition of the authorized user is based only on the trained OC-SVM. In this way, a very fast and significantly less resource consuming face recognition procedure can be performed, maintaining a high level of recognition.