Face recognition using position-dictionaries and region covariance feature

Abstract

In this paper, a new sparsity formulation called position-dictionary based sparse representation is developed for frontal face recognition. Different from the sparse representation based classification (SRC) method and the Gabor-feature based SRC (GSRC) method which both employ a global dictionary to decompose image patches, the proposed method constructs a position-dictionary for each location using training patches in the corresponding location since they resemble each other and are more likely to favor the same atoms. Sparse coefficients of each position-patch can be obtained by solving an \(l_{1}\)-norm minimization problem. For each face image, sparse coefficients of position-patches are pooled to construct a discriminative upper level feature to represent face image. PCA is used to perform dimension reduction. Each testing sample is represented as a sparse linear combination of all training samples, and recognition is accomplished by evaluating which class of training samples leads to the minimum reconstruction error. We compared the proposed method with SRC and GSRC method on three benchmark face databases. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher recognition rates and is robust to a certain degree of occlusions.