Pose Robust Low-resolution Face Recognition via Coupled Kernel-based Enhanced Discriminant Analysis

Most face recognition techniques have been successful in dealing with high-resolution (HR) frontal face images. However, real-world face recognition systems are often confronted with the low-resolution (LR) face images with pose and illumination variations. This is a very challenging issue, especially under the constraint of using only a single gallery image per person. To address the problem, we propose a novel approach called coupled kernel-based enhanced discriminant analysis (CKEDA). CKEDA aims to simultaneously project the features from LR non-frontal probe images and HR frontal gallery ones into a common space where discrimination property is maximized. There are four advantages of the proposed approach: 1) by using the appropriate kernel function, the data becomes linearly separable, which is beneficial for recognition; 2) inspired by linear discriminant analysis (LDA), we integrate multiple discriminant factors into our objective function to enhance the discrimination property; 3) we use the gallery extended trick to improve the recognition performance for a single gallery image per person problem; 4) our approach can address the problem of matching LR non-frontal probe images with HR frontal gallery images, which is difficult for most existing face recognition techniques. Experimental evaluation on the multi-PIE dataset signifies highly competitive performance of our algorithm.