Learning warps based similarity for pose-unconstrained face recognition

Abstract

Face recognition techniques are widely used in many applications, such as automatic detection of crime scenes from surveillance cameras for public safety. In these real cases, the pose and illumination variances between two matching faces have a big influence on the identification performance. Handling pose changes is an especially challenging task. In this paper, we propose the learning warps based similarity method to deal with face recognition across the pose problem. Warps are learned between two patches from probe faces and gallery faces using the Lucas-Kanade algorithm. Based on these warps, a frontal face registered in the gallery is transformed into a series of non-frontal viewpoints, which enables non-frontal probe face matching with the frontal gallery face. Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) keypoints (interest points) are detected from the generated viewpoints and matched with the probe faces. Moreover, based on the learned warps, the probability likelihood is used to calculate the probability of two faces being the same subject. Finally, a hybrid similarity combining the number of matching keypoints and the probability likelihood is proposed to describe the similarity between a gallery face and a probe face. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves better recognition accuracy than other algorithms it was compared to, especially when the pose difference is within 40 degrees.