Abstract—In this study, we propose a real time and robust method for passport recognition and face verification which can automatically recognize passport codes and discriminate forgery passports to improve efficiency and systematic control of immigration management. Usually, the face recognition algorithms address two major challenges. The first is when an individual intentionally alters the appearance and features using disguises, and the second is when limited gallery images are available for recognition. Find String area of the passport code is an important stage in our method. In this system main stage is the isolation of the string area of the passport code, from the digital image of passport obtained by a scanner under different circumstances such as angle. The algorithm starts with preprocessing and signal conditioning. Next string area of the passport code is localized using morphological operators. Then the result of this process sends to segmentation part. Segmentation part separates the picture of passport holder and characters individually. Finally recognition part recognizes the face and characters giving the result as the passport is forged or not. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using three databases that comprise of real and synthetic face images with different disguise artifacts. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated for decreasing number of gallery images and various types of disguises. After several tests using a forged passport and the passport with slanted images, the proposed algorithm shows a better performance compared to other existing algorithms in recognizing passport images and get through a %96.8 accurate in the extraction of passport code region, and %94 accurate in the segmentation of the characters and %92 in the recognition of the characters. The accuracy of %98 in the face detection and %97 correct in face recognition was also achieved.

Index Terms—Face verification, Character recognition, Passport recognition, Immigration management

The authors are with Department of computer engineering, University of Isfahan, Faculty of engineering, Isfahan,81746, Iran. (e-mail: Hamidreza_kasaee@yahoo.com, amonadjemi@yahoo. co.uk).

Cite: S. Hamidreza Mohades Kasaei, S. Amirhassan Monadjemi, and Kamal Jamshidi, "Application of the Face Recognition Procedure in Citizenship and Immigration Management System," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 611-614, 2011.