Face recognition via fast dense correspondence

Abstract

Face recognition plays a significant role in computer vision. It is well know that facial images are complex stimuli signals that suffer from non-rigid deformations, including misalignment, orientation, pose changes, and variations of facial expression, etc. In order to address these variations, this paper introduces an improved sparse-representation based face recognition method, which constructs dense pixel correspondences between training and testing facial samples. Specifically, we first construct a deformable spatial pyramid graph model that simultaneously regularizes matching consistency at multiple spatial extents - ranging from an entire image, though coarse grid cells, to every single pixel. Secondly, a matching energy function is designed to perform face alignment based on dense pixel correspondence, which is very effective to address the issue of non-rigid deformations. Finally, a novel coarse-to-fine matching scheme is designed so that we are able to speed up the optimization of the matching energy function. After the training samples are aligned with respect to testing samples, an improved sparse representation model is employed to perform face recognition. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other methods on ORL, AR, and LFWCrop datasets. Especially, the proposed approach improves nearly 4.4 % in terms of recognition accuracy and runs nearly 10 times faster than previous sparse approximation methods.