Facial recognition is one of the most challenging and interesting problems within the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. During the last few years, it has gained special attention due to its importance in relation to current issues such as security, surveillance systems and forensics analysis. Despite this high level of attention to facial recognition, the success is still limited by certain conditions; there is no method which gives reliable results in all situations. In this paper, we propose an efficient similarity index that resolves the shortcomings of the existing measures of feature and structural similarity. This measure, called the Feature-Based Structural Measure (FSM), combines the best features of the well-known SSIM (structural similarity index measure) and FSIM (feature similarity index measure) approaches, striking a balance between performance for similar and dissimilar images of human faces. In addition to the statistical structural properties provided by SSIM, edge detection is incorporated in FSM as a distinctive structural feature. Its performance is tested for a wide range of PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio), using ORL (Olivetti Research Laboratory, now AT\u26T Laboratory Cambridge) and FEI (Faculty of Industrial Engineering, São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo, Brazil) databases. The proposed measure is tested under conditions of Gaussian noise; simulation results show that the proposed FSM outperforms the well-known SSIM and FSIM approaches in its efficiency of similarity detection and recognition of human faces.
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