52 Int. J. Biometrics, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Two-level dimensionality reduced local directional pattern for face recognition Srinivasa Perumal Ramalingam School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India Fax: +91-416-2203092 Email: r.srinivasaperumal@vit.ac.in P.V.S.S.R. Chandra Mouli* School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India Fax: +91-416-2203092 Email: chandramouli@vit.ac.in *Corresponding author Abstract: Face recognition can be done efficiently using local approaches. Local directional pattern (LDP) is one such approach that serves as a descriptor for face recognition. It assigns a code for each pixel and the image is encoded. Histogram binning is done on the LDP encoded image to represent the face. A two-level dimensionality reduced local directional pattern (TL-DR-LDP) is proposed in this paper. The proposed TL-DR-LDP is robust in recognising the faces with maximum recognition rate. The proposed descriptor codes the image by dividing the image into regions and for each region, a code is defined. The same process is repeated for one more level and hence named as TL-DR-LDP. At each level, the dimensions of the feature vector are drastically reduced and performance of the descriptor maintains the higher recognition rate. The proposed descriptor is tested on standard benchmark databases like FERET, Extended YALE B and ORL. The results obtained prove that the TL-DR-LDP is exemplary. Keywords: local directional pattern; LDP; dimensionality reduction; face recognition; feature descriptor; face descriptor; face detection; local patterns. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Ramalingam, S.P. and Chandra Mouli, P.V.S.S.R. (2016) ‘Two-level dimensionality reduced local directional pattern for face recognition’, Int. J. Biometrics, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp.52–64. Biographical notes: Srinivasa Perumal Ramalingam is currently working as an Assistant Professor (Selection Grade) at School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, Tamil Nadu, India. He received his MTech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India in 2008. He is pursuing his PhD at VIT University, Vellore, India. He has published more than ten research papers in reputed international conferences and journals. He is a life member of CSI. His research interest includes digital image processing, biometrics, pattern recognition and software engineering.