Coupled discriminative manifold alignment for low-resolution face recognition

Abstract

In practical applications, due to a long distance between the monitored population and monitoring equipment, the face images or human pose captured by the cameras often incur low-resolution (LR), small size, and poor quality, which leads to extreme difficulty in directly matching an LR face with the high-resolution (HR) ones in the gallery. In this paper, we propose a novel coupled discriminative manifold alignment (CDMA) method for LR face recognition. Specifically, in the training stage the principal component analysis (PCA) is first used to reduce the dimensional gap between LR and HR facial features. Next the LR face images and the corresponding HR face images are converted into a common shared feature subspace by learning two linear mappings in a supervised manner, where the neighborhood samples within the same class and from different classes are jointly exploited to align the manifold structures of LR and HR faces. In the test stage, for a given LR face in the probe set, two learned coupled mappings (CMs) are applied to match the HR images in the gallery set through the correlative metric. Thorough experimental results on three representative face databases verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparing with other state-of-the-art competitors. In particular, the proposed method is capable of yielding more competitive recognition performance than other predecessors when lower dimensional feature subspaces are applied to match the expected HR faces.