A robust face super-resolution algorithm and its application in low-resolution face recognition system

Abstract

In real-world surveillance scenario, the face recognition (FR) systems pose a lot of challenges due to the captured low-resolution (LR) and noisy probe images. A new face super-resolution (SR) algorithm is proposed to design a recognition model overcoming the challenges of existing FR systems. The proposed SR algorithm inherits the merits of functional-interpolation and dictionary-based SR techniques. The functional interpolation assists in generating more discriminable output, whereas the dictionary-based approach assists in eliminating noise effects from the reconstruction process. Consequently, it produces more discriminable and noise-free high-resolution (HR) images from captured noisy LR probe images, suitable for real-world problems like low-resolution face recognition. The results obtained from the experiments performed on several popular face image datasets including FEI, FERET, and CAS-PEAL-R1 show that the proposed algorithm performs better than all the comparative SR methods.