Face Recognition in Uncontrolled Condition: Can Compressive Sen sing and Super-Resolution Meet the Challenge?

Abstract

This paper is concerned with face recognition under uncontrolled conditions, e.g. at a distance in surveillance scenarios, and post-rioting forensic, whereby captured face images are severely degraded/blurred and of low resolution. This is a tough challenge due to many factors including difficulties in determining a model for image degradation that encompasses a range of realistic capturing conditions. We present the results of our investigations into recently developed Compressive Sensing (CS) theory to develop scalable face recognition schemes using a variety of overcomplete dictionaries that construct super-resolved face images from any input low-resolution degraded face image. We shall demonstrate that deterministic as well as non-deterministic dictionaries that do not involve the use of face image information but satisfy some form of the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) used for CS can achieve face recognition accuracy levels as good a, if not better than, those achieved by dictionaries, proposed in the literature, that are learnt from face image databases using elaborate procedures. We shall elaborate on how this approach helps in crime fighting and terrorism.