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Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns

Conference Paper · May 2004

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-24670-1_36 · Source: DBLP

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 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns

Timo Ahonen, Abdenour Hadid, and Matti Pietikäinen

Machine Vision Group, Infotech Oulu

PO Box 4500, FIN-90014 University of Oulu, Finland,
{tahonen,hadid,mkp}@ee.oulu.fi, http://www.ee.oulu.fi/mvg/

Abstract. In this work, we present a novel approach to face recognition

which considers both shape and texture information to represent face im-
ages. The face area is first divided into small regions from which Local
Binary Pattern (LBP) histograms are extracted and concatenated into a
single, spatially enhanced feature histogram efficiently representing the
face image. The recognition is performed using a nearest neighbour classi-
fier in the computed feature space with Chi square as a dissimilarity mea-
sure. Extensive experiments clearly show the superiority of the proposed
scheme over all considered methods (PCA, Bayesian Intra/extrapersonal
Classifier and Elastic Bunch Graph Matching) on FERET tests which
include testing the robustness of the method against different facial ex-
pressions, lighting and aging of the subjects. In addition to its efficiency,
the simplicity of the proposed method allows for very fast feature extrac-
tion.

1 Introduction

The availability of numerous commercial face recognition systems [1] attests to

the significant progress achieved in the research field [2]. Despite these achieve-
ments, face recognition continues to be an active topic in computer vision re-
search. This is due to the fact that current systems perform well under relatively
controlled environments but tend to suffer when variations in different factors
(such as pose, illumination etc.) are present. Therefore, the goal of the ongoing
research is to increase the robustness of the systems against different factors.
Ideally, we aim to develop a face recognition system which mimics the remark-
able capabilities of human visual perception. Before attempting to reach such
a goal, one needs to continuously learn the strengths and weaknesses of the
proposed techniques in order to determine new directions for future improve-
ments. To facilitate this task, the FERET database and evaluation methodology
have been created [3]. The main goal of FERET is to compare different face
recognition algorithms on a common and large database and evaluate their per-
formance against different factors such as facial expression, illumination changes,
aging (time between the acquisition date of the training image and the image
presented to the algorithm) etc.
Among the major approaches developed for face recognition are Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) [4], Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) [5] and

T. Pajdla and J. Matas (Eds.): ECCV 2004, LNCS 3021, pp. 469–481, 2004.


c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004
470 T. Ahonen, A. Hadid, and M. Pietikäinen

Elastic Bunch Graph Matching (EBGM) [6]. PCA is commonly referred to as

the ”eigenface” method. It computes a reduced set of orthogonal basis vectors
or eigenfaces of the training face images. A new face image can be approximated
by a weighted sum of these eigenfaces. PCA provides an optimal linear transfor-
mation from the original image space to an orthogonal eigenspace with reduced
dimensionality in the sense of least mean squared reconstruction error. LDA
seeks to find a linear transformation by maximising the between-class variance
and minimising the within-class variance. In the EBGM algorithm, faces are rep-
resented as graphs, with nodes positioned at fiducial points and edges labelled
with distance vectors. Each node contains a set of Gabor wavelet coefficients,
known as a jet. Thus, the geometry of the face is encoded by the edges while
the grey value distribution (texture) is encoded by the jets. The identification
of a new face consists of determining among the constructed graphs, the one
which maximises the graph similarity function. Another proposed approach to
face recognition is the Bayesian Intra/extrapersonal Classifier (BIC) [7] which
uses the Bayesian decision theory to divide the difference vectors between pairs
of face images into two classes: one representing intrapersonal differences (i.e.
differences in a pair of images representing the same person) and extrapersonal
differences.
In this work, we introduce a new approach for face recognition which consid-
ers both shape and texture information to represent the face images. As opposed
to the EBGM approach, a straightforward extraction of the face feature vector
(histogram) is adopted in our algorithm. The face image is first divided into
small regions from which the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features [8,9] are ex-
tracted and concatenated into a single feature histogram efficiently representing
the face image. The textures of the facial regions are locally encoded by the LBP
patterns while the whole shape of the face is recovered by the construction of the
face feature histogram. The idea behind using the LBP features is that the face
images can be seen as composition of micro-patterns which are invariant with re-
spect to monotonic grey scale transformations. Combining these micro-patterns,
a global description of the face image is obtained.

2 Face Description with Local Binary Patterns

The original LBP operator, introduced by Ojala et al. [9], is a powerful means of
texture description. The operator labels the pixels of an image by thresholding
the 3x3-neighbourhood of each pixel with the center value and considering the
result as a binary number. Then the histogram of the labels can be used as a
texture descriptor. See Figure 1 for an illustration of the basic LBP operator.
Later the operator was extended to use neigbourhoods of different sizes [8].
Using circular neighbourhoods and bilinearly interpolating the pixel values allow
any radius and number of pixels in the neighbourhood. For neighbourhoods we
will use the notation (P, R) which means P sampling points on a circle of radius
of R. See Figure 2 for an example of the circular (8,2) neighbourhood.
Another extension to the original operator uses so called uniform patterns
[8]. A Local Binary Pattern is called uniform if it contains at most two bitwise
 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns 471

5 9 1 1 1 0
Threshold Binary: 11010011
4 4 6 1 1
Decimal: 211
7 2 3 1 0 0

Fig. 1. The basic LBP operator.

Fig. 2. The circular (8,2) neigbourhood. The pixel values are bilinearly interpolated
whenever the sampling point is not in the center of a pixel.

transitions from 0 to 1 or vice versa when the binary string is considered circular.
For example, 00000000, 00011110 and 10000011 are uniform patterns. Ojala et al.
noticed that in their experiments with texture images, uniform patterns account
for a bit less than 90 % of all patterns when using the (8,1) neighbourhood and
for around 70 % in the (16,2) neighbourhood.
We use the following notation for the LBP operator: LBPu2 P,R . The subscript
represents using the operator in a (P, R) neighbourhood. Superscript u2 stands
for using only uniform patterns and labelling all remaining patterns with a single
label.
A histogram of the labeled image fl (x, y) can be defined as


Hi = I {fl (x, y) = i} , i = 0, . . . , n − 1, (1)
x,y

in which n is the number of different labels produced by the LBP operator and

1, A is true
I {A} =
0, A is false.
This histogram contains information about the distribution of the local micropat-
terns, such as edges, spots and flat areas, over the whole image. For efficient face
representation, one should retain also spatial information. For this purpose, the
image is divided into regions R0 , R1 , . . . Rm−1 (see Figure 5 (a)) and the spatially
enhanced histogram is defined as


Hi,j = I {fl (x, y) = i} I {(x, y) ∈ Rj } , i = 0, . . . , n−1, j = 0, . . . , m−1. (2)
x,y

In this histogram, we effectively have a description of the face on three different

levels of locality: the labels for the histogram contain information about the
patterns on a pixel-level, the labels are summed over a small region to produce
information on a regional level and the regional histograms are concatenated to
build a global description of the face.
472 T. Ahonen, A. Hadid, and M. Pietikäinen

From the pattern classification point of view, a usual problem in face recog-
nition is having a plethora of classes and only a few, possibly only one, training
sample(s) per class. For this reason, more sophisticated classifiers are not needed
but a nearest-neighbour classifier is used. Several possible dissimilarity measures
have been proposed for histograms:
– Histogram intersection:


D(S, M) = min(Si , Mi ) (3)
i

– Log-likelihood statistic:


L(S, M) = − Si log Mi (4)
i

– Chi square statistic (χ2 ):

(Si − Mi )2
χ2 (S, M) = (5)
i
Si + Mi

All of these measures can be extended to the spatially enhanced histogram

by simply summing over i and j.
When the image has been divided into regions, it can be expected that some
of the regions contain more useful information than others in terms of distin-
guishing between people. For example, eyes seem to be an important cue in
human face recognition [2,10]. To take advantage of this, a weight can be set for
each region based on the importance of the information it contains. For example,
the weighted χ2 statistic becomes

(Si,j − Mi,j )2
χ2w (S, M) = wj , (6)
i,j
Si,j + Mi,j

in which wj is the weight for region j.

3 Experimental Design
The CSU Face Identification Evaluation System [11] was utilised to test the
performance of the proposed algorithm. The system follows the procedure of
the FERET test for semi-automatic face recognition algorithms [12] with slight
modifications. The system uses the full-frontal face images from the FERET
database and works as follows (see Figure 3):
1. The system preprocesses the images. The images are registered using eye
coordinates and cropped with an elliptical mask to exclude non-face area
from the image. After this, the grey histogram over the non-masked area is
equalised.
2. If needed, the algorithm is trained using a subset of the images.
 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns 473

Algorithm
training
subset
Image files
Preprocessed
Preprocessing Training data
image files
Eye coordinates

Experimental
algorithm

Distance matrix
Rank curve NN Classifier Gallery image list
Probe image list

Fig. 3. The parts of the CSU face recognition system.

3. The preprocessed images are fed into the experimental algorithm which out-
puts a distance matrix containing the distance between each pair of images.
4. Using the distance matrix and different settings for gallery and probe image
sets, the system calculates rank curves for the system. These can be calcu-
lated for prespecified gallery and probe image sets or by choosing a random
permutations of one large set as probe and gallery sets and calculating the
average performance. The advantage of the prior method is that it is easy
to measure the performance of the algorithm under certain challenges (e.g.
different lighting conditions) whereas the latter is more reliable statistically.
The CSU system uses the same gallery and probe image sets that were used
in the original FERET test. Each set contains at most one image per person.
These sets are:
– fa set, used as a gallery set, contains frontal images of 1196 people.
– fb set (1195 images). The subjects were asked for an alternative facial ex-
pression than in fa photograph.
– fc set (194 images). The photos were taken under different lighting condi-
tions.
– dup I set (722 images). The photos were taken later in time.
– dup II set (234 images). This is a subset of the dup I set containing those
images that were taken at least a year after the corresponding gallery image.
In this paper, we use two statistics produced by the permutation tool: the
mean recognition rate with a 95 % confidence interval and the probability of one
algorithm outperforming another [13]. The image list used by the tool1 contains
4 images of each of the 160 subjects. One image of every subject is selected to
the gallery set and another image to the probe set on each permutation. The
number of permutations is 10000.
1
list640.srt in the CSU Face Identification Evaluation System package
474 T. Ahonen, A. Hadid, and M. Pietikäinen

The CSU system comes with implementations of the PCA, LDA, Bayesian
intra/extrapersonal (BIC) and Elastic Bunch Graph Matching (EBGM) face
recognition algorithms. We include the results obtained with PCA, BIC2 and
EBGM here for comparison.
There are some parameters that can be chosen to optimise the performance
of the proposed algorithm. The first one is choosing the LBP operator. Choosing
an operator that produces a large amount of different labels makes the histogram
long and thus calculating the distace matrix gets slow. Using a small number of
labels makes the feature vector shorter but also means losing more information.
A small radius of the operator makes the information encoded in the histogram
more local. The number of labels for a neighbourhood of 8 pixels is 256 for
standard LBP and 59 for LBPu2 . For the 16-neighbourhood the numbers are
65536 and 243, respectively. The usage of uniform patterns is motivated by the
fact that most patterns in facial images are uniform: we found out that in the
preprocessed FERET images, 79.3 % of all the patterns produced by the LBP16,2
operator are uniform.
Another parameter is the division of the images into regions R0 , . . . , Rm−1 .
The length of the feature vector becomes B = mBr , in which m is the number
of regions and Br is the LBP histogram length. A large number of small regions
produces long feature vectors causing high memory consumption and slow clas-
sification, whereas using large regions causes more spatial information to be lost.
We chose to divide the image with a grid into k ∗ k equally sized rectangular
regions (windows). See Figure 5 (a) for an example of a preprocessed facial image
divided into 49 windows.

4 Results

To assess the performance of the three proposed distance measures, we chose

to use two different LBP operators in windows of varying size. We calculated
the distance matrices for each of the different settings and used the permutation
tool to calculate the probabilities of the measures outperforming each other. The
results are in Table 1.
From the statistical hypothesis testing point of view, it cannot be said that
any of the metrics would be the best one with a high (>0.95) probability.
However, histogram intersection and χ2 measures are clearly better than log-
likelihood when the average number of labels per histogram bin is low but log-
likelihood performs better when this number increases. The log-likelihood mea-
sure has been preferred for texture images [8] but because of its poor performance
on small windows in our experiments it is not appealing for face recognition. The
χ2 measure performs slightly better than histogram intersection so we chose to
use it despite the simplicity of the histogram intersection.
When looking for the optimal window size and LBP operator we noticed
that the LBP representation is quite robust with respect to the selection of the
2
Two decision rules can be used with the BIC classifier: Maximum A Posteriori (MAP)
or Maximum Likelihood (ML). We include here the results obtained with MAP.
 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns 475

Table 1. The performance of the histogram intersection, log-likelihood and χ2 dissim-

ilarity measures using different window sizes and LBP operators.

Operator Window size P(HI > LL) P(χ2 > HI) P(χ2 > LL)
LBPu2
8,1 18x21 1.000 0.714 1.000
LBPu2
8,1 21x25 1.000 0.609 1.000
LBPu2
8,1 26x30 0.309 0.806 0.587
LBPu2
16,2 18x21 1.000 0.850 1.000
LBPu2
16,2 21x25 1.000 0.874 1.000
LBPu2
16,2 26x30 1.000 0.918 1.000
LBPu2
16,2 32x37 1.000 0.933 1.000
LBPu2
16,2 43x50 0.085 0.897 0.418

parameters. Changes in the parameters may cause big differences in the length
of the feature vector, but the overall performance is not necessarily affected
significantly. For example, changing from LBPu2 16,2 in 18*21-sized windows to
LBPu28,2 in 21*25-sized windows drops the histogram length from 11907 to 2124,
while the mean recognition rate reduces from 76.9 % to 73.8 %.
The mean recognition rates for the LBPu2 u2 u2
16,2 , LBP8,2 and LBP8,1 as a func-
tion of the window size are plotted in Figure 4. The original 130*150 pixel image
was divided into k ∗ k windows, k = 4, 5, . . . , 11, 13, 16 resulting in window sizes
from 32*37 to 8*9. The five smallest windows were not tested using the LBPu2 16,2
operator because of the high dimension of the feature vector that would have
been produced. As expected, a larger window size induces a decreased recog-
nition rate because of the loss of spatial information. The LBPu2 8,2 operator in
18*21 pixel windows was selected since it is a good trade-off between recognition
performance and feature vector length.

0.8

0.75
Mean recognition rate

0.7

0.65

LBPu2
8,2
0.6 LBPu2
16,2
LBPu2
8,1

0.55
8x9 10x11 11x13 13x15 14x16 16x18 18x21 21x25 26x30 32x37
Window size

Fig. 4. The mean recognition rate for three LBP operators as a function of the window
size.
476 T. Ahonen, A. Hadid, and M. Pietikäinen

To find the weights wj for the weighted χ2 statistic (Equation 6), the follow-
ing procedure was adopted: a training set was classified using only one of the
18*21 windows at a time. The recognition rates of corresponding windows on
the left and right half of the face were averaged. Then the windows whose rate
lay below the 0.2 percentile of the rates got weight 0 and windows whose rate
lay above the 0.8 and 0.9 percentile got weights 2.0 and 4.0, respectively. The
other windows got weight 1.0.
The CSU system comes with two training sets, the standard FERET training
set and the CSU training set. As shown in Table 2, these sets are basically subsets
of the fa, fb and dup I sets. Since illumination changes pose a major challenge
to most face recognition algorithms and none of the images in the fc set were
included in the standard training sets, we defined a third training set, called the
subfc training set, which contains half of the fc set (subjects 1013–1109).
Table 2. Number of images in common between different training and testing sets.

Training set fa fb fc dup I dup II Total number of images

FERET standard 270 270 0 184 0 736
CSU standard 396 0 0 99 0 501
subfc 97 0 97 0 0 194

The permutation tool was used to compare the weights computed from the
different training sets. The weights obtained using the FERET standard set gave
an average recognition rate of 0.80, the CSU standard set 0.78 and the subfc set
0.81. The pairwise comparison showed that the weights obtained with the subfc
set are likely to be better than the others (P(subfc > FERET)=0.66 and P(subfc
> CSU)=0.88).
The weights computed using the subfc set are illustrated in Figure 5 (b).
The weights were selected without utilising an actual optimisation procedure
and thus they are probably not optimal. Despite that, in comparison with the
nonweighted method, we got an improvement both in the processing time (see
Table 3) and recognition rate (P(weighted > nonweighted)=0.976).
The image set which was used to determine the weights overlaps with the fc
set. To avoid biased results, we preserved the other half of the fc set (subjects

(a) (b)

Fig. 5. (a) An example of a facial image divided into 7x7 windows. (b) The weights
set for weighted χ2 dissimilarity measure. Black squares indicate weight 0.0, dark grey
1.0, light grey 2.0 and white 4.0.
 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns 477

Table 3. Processing times of weighted and nonweighted LBP on a 1800 MHz AMD
Athlon running Linux. Note that processing FERET images (last column) includes
heavy disk operations, most notably writing the distance matrix of about 400 MB to
disk.

Type of LBP Feature ext. Distance calc. Processing

(ms / image) (µs / pair) FERET images (s)
Weighted 3.49 46.6 1046
Nonweighted 4.14 58.6 1285

1110-1206) as a validation set. Introducing the weights increased the recognition

rate for the training set from 0.49 to 0.81 and for the validation set from 0.52 to
0.77. The improvement is slightly higher for the training set, but the significant
improvement for the validation set implies that the calculated weights generalize
well outside the training set.
The final recognition results for the proposed method are in shown Table 4
and the rank curves are plotted in Figures 6 (a)–(d). LBP clearly outperforms
the control algorithms in all the FERET test sets and in the statistical test. It
should be noted that the CSU implementations of the algorithms whose results
we included here do not achieve the same figures as in the original FERET test
due to some modifications in the experimental setup as mentioned in [11]. The
results of the original FERET test can be found in [12].

Table 4. The recognition rates of the LBP and comparison algorithms for the FERET
probe sets and the mean recognition rate of the permutation test with a 95 % confidence
interval.

Method fb fc dup I dup II lower mean upper

LBP, weighted 0.97 0.79 0.66 0.64 0.76 0.81 0.85
LBP, nonweighted 0.93 0.51 0.61 0.50 0.71 0.76 0.81
PCA, MahCosine 0.85 0.65 0.44 0.22 0.66 0.72 0.78
Bayesian, MAP 0.82 0.37 0.52 0.32 0.67 0.72 0.78
EBGM Optimal 0.90 0.42 0.46 0.24 0.61 0.66 0.71

Additionally, to gain knowledge about the robustness of our method against

slight variations of pose angle and alignment we tested our approach on the
ORL face databse (Olivetti Research Laboratory, Cambridge) [14]. The database
contains 10 different images of 40 distinct subjects (individuals). Some images
were taken at different times for some people. There are variations in facial
expression (open/closed eyes, smiling/non-smiling.), facial details (glasses/no
glasses) and scale (variation of up to about 10 %). All the images were taken
against a dark homogenous background with the subjects in an upright, frontal
position, with tolerance for some tilting and rotation of up to about 20 degrees.
The images are grey scale with a resolution of 92*112. Randomly selecting 5
images for the gallery set and the other 5 for the probe set, the preliminary
experiments result in 0.98 of average recognition rate and 0.012 of standard
478 T. Ahonen, A. Hadid, and M. Pietikäinen

Cumulative score 0.95

0.9

LBP weighted
0.85 LBP nonweighted
Bayesian MAP
PCA MahCosine
EBGM CSU optimal
0.8
0 10 20 30 40 50
Rank

0.9

0.8
Cumulative score

0.7

0.6

LBP weighted
0.5
LBP nonweighted
Bayesian MAP
0.4 PCA MahCosine
EBGM CSU optimal
0.3
0 10 20 30 40 50
Rank

0.9
Cumulative score

0.8

0.7

0.6
LBP weighted
LBP nonweighted
0.5 Bayesian MAP
PCA MahCosine
EBGM CSU optimal
0.4
0 10 20 30 40 50
Rank

Fig. 6. (a), (b), (c) Rank curves for the fb, fc and dup1 probe sets (from top to
down).
 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns 479

0.9

Cumulative score 0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5
LBP weighted
0.4 LBP nonweighted
Bayesian MAP
0.3 PCA MahCosine
EBGM CSU optimal
0.2
0 10 20 30 40 50
Rank

Fig. 6. (d) Rank curve for the dup2 probe set.

deviation of 100 random permutations using LBPu2 16,2 , a windows size of 30*37
and χ2 as a dissimilarity measure. Window weights were not used. Note that no
registration or preprocessing was made on the images. The good results indicate
that our approach is also relatively robust with respect to alignment. However,
because of the lack of a standardised protocol for evaluating and comparing
systems on the ORL database, it is to difficult to include here a fair comparison
with other approaches that have been tested using ORL.

5 Discussion and Conclusion

Face images can be seen as a composition of micro-patterns which can be well
described by LBP. We exploited this observation and proposed a simple and
efficient representation for face recognition. In our approach, a face image is
first divided into several blocks (facial regions) from which we extract local bi-
nary patterns and construct a global feature histogram that represents both
the statistics of the facial micro-patterns and their spatial locations. Then, face
recognition is performed using a nearest neighbour classifier in the computed
feature space with χ2 as a dissimilarity measure. The proposed face represen-
tation can be easily extracted in a single scan through the image, without any
complex analysis as in the EBGM algorithm.
We implemented the proposed approach and compared it against well-known
methods such as PCA, EBGM and BIC. To achieve a fair comparison, we con-
sidered the FERET face database and protocol, which are a de facto standard in
face recognition research. In addition, we adopted normalisation steps and im-
plementation of the different algorithms (PCA, EBGM and BIC) from the CSU
face identification evaluation system. Reporting our results in such a way does
not only make the comparative study fair but also offers the research community
new performances to which they are invited to compare their results.
480 T. Ahonen, A. Hadid, and M. Pietikäinen

The experimental results clearly show that the LBP-based method outper-
forms other approaches on all probe sets (fb, fc, dup I and dup II ). For instance,
our method achieved a recognition rate of 97% in the case of recognising faces
under different facial expressions (fb set), while the best performance among
the tested methods did not exceed 90%. Under different lighting conditions (fc
set), the LBP-based approach has also achieved the best performance with a
recognition rate of 79% against 65%, 37% and 42% for PCA, BIC and EBGM,
respectively. The relatively poor results on the fc set confirm that illumination
change is still a challenge to face recognition. Additionally, recognising duplicate
faces (when the photos are taken later in time) is another challenge, although
our proposed method performed better than the others.
To assess the performance of the LBP-based method on different datasets, we
also considered the ORL face database. The experiments not only confirmed the
validity of out approach, but also demonstrated its relative robustness against
changes in alignment.
Analyzing the different parameters in extracting the face representation, we
noticed a relative insensitivity to the choice of the LBP operator and region
size. This is an interesting result since the other considered approaches are more
sensitive to their free parameters. This means that only simple calculations are
needed for the LBP description while some other methods use exhaustive training
to find their optimal parameters.
In deriving the face representation, we divided the face image into several
regions. We used only rectangular regions each of the same size but other di-
visions are also possible as regions of different sizes and shapes could be used.
To improve our system, we analyzed the importance of each region. This is mo-
tivated by the psychophysical findings which indicate that some facial features
(such as eyes) play more important roles in face recognition than other features
(such as the nose). Thus we calculated and assigned weights from 0 to 4 to the
regions (See Figure 5 (b)). Although this kind of simple approach was adopted to
compute the weights, improvements were still obtained. We are currently inves-
tigating approaches for dividing the image into regions and finding more optimal
weights for them.
Although we clearly showed the simplicity of LBP-based face representation
extraction and its robustness with respect to facial expression, aging, illumi-
nation and alignment, some improvements are still possible. For instance, one
drawback of our approach lies in the length of the feature vector which is used for
face representation. Indeed, using a feature vector length of 2301 slows down the
recognition speed especially, for very large face databases. A possible direction
is to apply a dimensionality reduction to the face feature vectors. However, due
to the good results we have obtained, we expect that the methodology presented
here is applicable to several other object recognition tasks as well.

Acknowledgements. This research was supported in part by the Academy of

Finland.
 Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns 481

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