Collaborative Representation based Classification for Face Recognition

By coding a query sample as a sparse linear combination of all training samples and then classifying it by evaluating which class leads to the minimal coding residual, sparse representation based classification (SRC) leads to interesting results for robust face recognition. It is widely believed that the l1- norm sparsity constraint on coding coefficients plays a key role in the success of SRC, while its use of all training samples to collaboratively represent the query sample is rather ignored. In this paper we discuss how SRC works, and show that the collaborative representation mechanism used in SRC is much more crucial to its success of face classification. The SRC is a special case of collaborative representation based classification (CRC), which has various instantiations by applying different norms to the coding residual and coding coefficient. More specifically, the l1 or l2 norm characterization of coding residual is related to the robustness of CRC to outlier facial pixels, while the l1 or l2 norm characterization of coding coefficient is related to the degree of discrimination of facial features. Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the face recognition accuracy and efficiency of CRC with different instantiations.Comment: It is a substantial revision of a previous conference paper (L. Zhang, M. Yang, et al. "Sparse Representation or Collaborative Representation: Which Helps Face Recognition?" in ICCV 2011

A survey of face recognition techniques under occlusion

The limited capacity to recognize faces under occlusions is a long-standing problem that presents a unique challenge for face recognition systems and even for humans. The problem regarding occlusion is less covered by research when compared to other challenges such as pose variation, different expressions, etc. Nevertheless, occluded face recognition is imperative to exploit the full potential of face recognition for real-world applications. In this paper, we restrict the scope to occluded face recognition. First, we explore what the occlusion problem is and what inherent difficulties can arise. As a part of this review, we introduce face detection under occlusion, a preliminary step in face recognition. Second, we present how existing face recognition methods cope with the occlusion problem and classify them into three categories, which are 1) occlusion robust feature extraction approaches, 2) occlusion aware face recognition approaches, and 3) occlusion recovery based face recognition approaches. Furthermore, we analyze the motivations, innovations, pros and cons, and the performance of representative approaches for comparison. Finally, future challenges and method trends of occluded face recognition are thoroughly discussed

Online multi-modal robust non-negative dictionary learning for visual tracking

© 2015 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Dictionary learning is a method of acquiring a collection of atoms for subsequent signal representation. Due to its excellent representation ability, dictionary learning has been widely applied in multimedia and computer vision. However, conventional dictionary learning algorithms fail to deal with multi-modal datasets. In this paper, we propose an online multi-modal robust non-negative dictionary learning (OMRNDL) algorithm to overcome this deficiency. Notably, OMRNDL casts visual tracking as a dictionary learning problem under the particle filter framework and captures the intrinsic knowledge about the target from multiple visual modalities, e.g., pixel intensity and texture information. To this end, OMRNDL adaptively learns an individual dictionary, i.e., template, for each modality from available frames, and then represents new particles over all the learned dictionaries by minimizing the fitting loss of data based on M-estimation. The resultant representation coefficient can be viewed as the common semantic representation of particles across multiple modalities, and can be utilized to track the target. OMRNDL incrementally learns the dictionary and the coefficient of each particle by using multiplicative update rules to respectively guarantee their non-negativity constraints. Experimental results on a popular challenging video benchmark validate the effectiveness of OMRNDL for visual tracking in both quantity and quality

Efficient Detection of Occlusion prior to Robust Face Recognition

While there has been an enormous amount of research on face recognition under pose/illumination/expression changes and image degradations, problems caused by occlusions attracted relatively less attention. Facial occlusions, due, for example, to sunglasses, hat/cap, scarf, and beard, can significantly deteriorate performances of face recognition systems in uncontrolled environments such as video surveillance. The goal of this paper is to explore face recognition in the presence of partial occlusions, with emphasis on real-world scenarios (e.g., sunglasses and scarf). In this paper, we propose an efficient approach which consists of first analysing the presence of potential occlusion on a face and then conducting face recognition on the nonoccluded facial regions based on selective local Gabor binary patterns. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art works including KLD-LGBPHS, S-LNMF, OA-LBP, and RSC. Furthermore, performances of the proposed approach are evaluated under illumination and extreme facial expression changes provide also significant results

Graph Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Sparse Coding

In this paper, we propose a sparseness constraint NMF method, named graph regularized matrix factorization with sparse coding (GRNMF_SC). By combining manifold learning and sparse coding techniques together, GRNMF_SC can efficiently extract the basic vectors from the data space, which preserves the intrinsic manifold structure and also the local features of original data. The target function of our method is easy to propose, while the solving procedures are really nontrivial; in the paper we gave the detailed derivation of solving the target function and also a strict proof of its convergence, which is a key contribution of the paper. Compared with sparseness constrained NMF and GNMF algorithms, GRNMF_SC can learn much sparser representation of the data and can also preserve the geometrical structure of the data, which endow it with powerful discriminating ability. Furthermore, the GRNMF_SC is generalized as supervised and unsupervised models to meet different demands. Experimental results demonstrate encouraging results of GRNMF_SC on image recognition and clustering when comparing with the other state-of-the-art NMF methods