title: Toward a practical face recognition system: robust alignment and illumination by sparse representation.
abstract: Many classic and contemporary face recognition algorithms work well on public data sets, but degrade sharply when they are used in a real recognition system. This is mostly due to the difficulty of simultaneously handling variations in illumination, image misalignment, and occlusion in the test image. We consider a scenario where the training images are well controlled and test images are only loosely controlled. We propose a conceptually simple face recognition system that achieves a high degree of robustness and stability to illumination variation, image misalignment, and partial occlusion. The system uses tools from sparse representation to align a test face image to a set of frontal training images. The region of attraction of our alignment algorithm is computed empirically for public face data sets such as Multi-PIE. We demonstrate how to capture a set of training images with enough illumination variation that they span test images taken under uncontrolled illumination. In order to evaluate how our algorithms work under practical testing conditions, we have implemented a complete face recognition system, including a projector-based training acquisition system. Our system can efficiently and effectively recognize faces under a variety of realistic conditions, using only frontal images under the proposed illuminations as training.
authors.affiliation: Coordinated Science Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1308 West Main St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. awagner@illinois.edu
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.forename: Arvind
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ganesh
authors.forename: Zihan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Hossein
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Mobahi
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ma
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D056667:Biometric Identification / Q000379:methods*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008029:Lighting; D015203:Reproducibility of Results