Dynamic Feature Subset Selection for Occluded Face Recognition

Abstract

Accurate recognition of person identity is a critical task in civil society for various application and different needs. There are different well-established biometric modalities that can be used for recognition purposes such as face, voice, fingerprint, iris, etc. Recently, face images have been widely used for person recognition, since the human face is the most natural and user-friendly recognition method. However, in real-life applications, some factors may degrade the recognition performance, such as partial face occlusion, poses, illumination conditions, facial expressions, etc. In this paper, we propose two dynamic feature subset selection (DFSS) methods to achieve better recognition for occluded faces. The proposed DFSS methods are based on resilient algorithms attempting to minimize the negative influence of confusing and low-quality features extracted from occluded areas by either exclusion or weight reduction. Principal Component Analysis and Gabor filtering based approaches are initially used for face feature extraction, then the proposed DFSS methods are dynamically enforced. This is leading to more effective feature representation and an improved recognition performance. To validate their effectiveness, multiple experiments are conducted and the performance of different methods is compared. The experimental work is carried out using AR database and Extended Yale Face Database B. The obtained results of face identification and verification show that both proposed DFSS methods outperform the standard (static) use of the whole number of features and the equal feature weights.