Learning-based Face Synthesis for Pose-Robust Recognition from Single Image

• DOI: 10.5244/c.23.31
• Publication Date: 2012-02-07T10:33:24Z
• Authors: Akshay Asthana; Conrad Sanderson; Tom Gedeon; Roland Goecke
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Face recognition in real-world conditions requires the ability to deal with a number of conditions, such as variations in pose, illumination and expression. In this paper, we focus on variations in head pose and use a computationally efficient regression-based approach for synthesising face images in different poses, which are used to extend the face recognition training set. In this data-driven approach, the correspondences between facial landmark points in frontal and non-frontal views are learnt offline from manually annotated training data via Gaussian Process Regression. We then use this learner to synthesise non-frontal face images from any unseen frontal image. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, two frontal face recognition systems (the commonly used PCA and the recent Multi-Region Histograms) are augmented with synthesised non-frontal views for each person. This synthesis and augmentation approach is experimentally validated on the FERET dataset, showing a considerable improvement in recognition rates for ±40◦ and ±60◦ views, while maintaining high recognition rates for ±15◦ and ±25◦ views.