Gabor feature based robust representation and classification for face recognition with Gabor occlusion dictionary

In this paper, we present a facial expression recognition method based on Gabor feature and sparse representation. Sparse Representation based Classification (SRC) has been widely used in computer vision and pattern recognition. And Gabor filter banks can be used to approximately model the signal processing in visual primary cortex. We believe that the nature of the attractive performance of SRC and Gabor feature lies in that they both followed the natures of signal perception of retina and information processing of cortex in human vision. Therefore, we combined the Gabor feature and SRC for facial expression recognition. The comparison experiments of proposed Gabor+SRC algorithm and straightforward SRC application are conducted on JAFFE database. And the experimental results showed the attractive performance of the proposed Gabor+SRC method.

We propose a fast kernel sparse representation based classification (SRC) for undersampling problem, i.e., each class has very few training samples, in face recognition. The proposed algorithm exploits a nonlinear mapping to map the data from the original input space into a high-dimensional feature space. Then, it performs very fast sparse representation and classification of samples in this space. Similar to the typical SRC methods, the proposed approach is based on the L1 norm minimization, whose direct solution can be very time-consuming. In order to improve the computational efficiency, our method uses the coordinate descent method in the feature space, which can avoid directly solving the L1 norm minimization problem, and significantly expedites the computational procedure. Compared with other SRC methods based on the L1 norm minimization, our proposed method achieves very high computational efficiency, without significantly degrading the classification performance. Several experiments on popular face databases demonstrate that our method is a promising efficient kernel SRC based method.

Robust automatic facial expression detection method based on sparse representation plus LBP map

The theory of compressive sensing applies the sparse representation to the extraction of useful information from signals and brings a breakthrough to the theory of signal sampling. Based on compressive sensing, sparse representation-based classification (SRC) is proposed. SRC uses the compressibility of the image data to represent the facial image sparsely and could solve the problems of both massive calculation and information loss in dealing with signals. SRC does not, however, deal with the effects of variable illumination, posture and incomplete face image, which could result in severe performance degradation. This paper studies the differences between SRC recognition and human recognition. We find that there is an obvious disadvantage in the SRC algorithm, and it will significantly affect the face recognition performance in actual environment, especially for the variable illumination, posture and incomplete face image. To overcome the disadvantage of SRC algorithm, we propose an SRC-based twice face recognition algorithm named T_SRC. T_SRC uses bidirectional PCA, linear discriminant analysis and GradientFace to execute multichannel analysis, which could extract more "holistic/configural" face features in actual environment than by using SRC algorithm directly. Based on the multichannel analysis, we identify the test image by SRC firstly. Then, by analyzing the residual, this algorithm could decide whether the twice recognition is needed. If the twice recognition is needed, T_SRC extracts the facial details ("featural" face features) by the improved Harris point and Gabor filter detector. We suppose that the facial details are more stable than the whole face in actual environment, and later experiments verify our assumption. At last, this algorithm identifies the class of the test image by SRC again. The results of the experiments prove that the T_SRC algorithm has better recognition rate than SRC.

Sparse representation based classification (SRC) and collaborative representation based classification (CRC) are two well-known methods in representation-based classification for face recognition. SRC emphasizes on the role of sparsity in coding, while CRC obtains an enhanced sparse representation with collaborative contributions from all classes. Previous studies show that sparsity of representation coefficients of SRC and CRC is significant for robust classification that may amplify the nonlocal contribution from other classes. However, the parameters are closely associated with the sparsity and it is very difficult to solve the optimal solutions. This paper proposed a novel representation-based image classification method that integrates SRC with CRC by a multiplication operation on the solutions to obtain enhanced sparse representation. We conducted experiments on several benchmark face databases and the experimental results showed that our algorithm produces higher accuracy on classification than both SRC and CRC.

Spatial texture features have been demonstrated to be very useful for the recently-proposed representation-based classifiers, such as the sparse representation-based classifier (SRC) and nearest regularized subspace (NRS). In this work, a weighted residual-fusion-based strategy with multiple features is proposed for these classifiers. Multiple features include local binary patterns (LBP), Gabor features, and the original spectral signatures. In the proposed classification framework, representation residuals for a testing pixel from using each type of features are weighted to generate the final representation residual, and then the label of the testing pixel is determined according to the class yielding the minimum final residual. The motivation of this work is that different features represent pixels from different perspectives and their fusion in the residual domain can enhance the discriminative ability. Experimental results of several real hyperspectral image datasets demonstrate that the proposed residual-based fusion outperforms the original NRS, SRC, support vector machine (SVM) with LBP, and SVM with Gabor features, even in small-sample-size (SSS) situations.

Joint and collaborative representation with local adaptive convolution feature for face recognition with single sample per person

In the past few years, face recognition based on sparse representation is providing satisfactory classification accuracy. Face images involved in real life applications usually exhibit considerable pose, lighting, and expression variations, resulting in significant performance degradation of traditional sparse-based algorithms. In this paper, a novel face recognition method is developed as multi-level sparse (MLS) classifier with multi-modal feature extraction, which integrates benefits of sparse representation manifolds. In MLS classifier, sparse representation-based classification is performed at multiple levels to extract the hierarchical relationship information between training and testing images, which not only improves classification accuracy but also makes the system scalable. Also, the use of multi-modal feature in MLS classifier makes it discriminative to face changes while robust to intra-personal variations. To highlight the competency of proposed method, results are compared with sparse representation and other existing state-of-art methods in terms of mean classification error. An investigation on classification accuracy is performed to showcase the reliability of proposed method.

Sparse representation-based classifiers have shown outstanding accuracy and robustness in image classification tasks even with the presence of intense noise and occlusion. However, it has been discovered that the performance degrades significantly either when test image is not aligned with the dictionary atoms or the dictionary atoms themselves are not aligned with each other, in which cases the sparse linear representation assumption fails. In this paper, having both training and test images misaligned, we introduce a novel sparse coding framework that is able to efficiently adapt the dictionary atoms to the test image via large displacement optical flow. In the proposed algorithm, every dictionary atom is automatically aligned with the input image and the sparse code is then recovered using the adapted dictionary atoms. A corresponding supervised dictionary learning algorithm is also developed for the proposed framework. Experimental results on digit datasets recognition verify the efficacy and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

The sparse representation-based classifier (SRC) has been developed and verified as having great potential for real-world face recognition. In this paper, we propose a discriminative projection and representation-based classification (DPRC) method to enhance the discriminant ability of the SRC. The proposed method first obtains a discriminative projection matrix not only maximizing the ratio of the distance within interclass over the distance within intraclass, but also minimizing the linear approximation error within intraclass. Then it maps the original data onto the discriminative space, and adopts an SRC method to obtain the final solution. An inexact augmented Lagrangian method of multiplier is proposed for finding the optimal representation vector in our framework, and a proximal alternating minimization method is adopted to the iteration subproblems of the proposed method. The proposed method is proven to have the subsequence convergence property. Experimental results on Yale, ORL, and AR face image databases demonstrate that, compared with some existing feature extraction methods based on the SRC, the proposed DPRC method is more efficient.

In this paper, a novel discriminative dictionary learning method is proposed for sparse-representation-based classification (SRC) to label highly dimensional hyperspectral imagery (HSI). In SRC, a dictionary is conventionally constructed using all of the training pixels, which is not only inefficient due to the large size of typical HSI images but also ineffective in capturing class-discriminative information crucial for classification. We address the dictionary design problem with the inspiration from the learning vector quantization technique and propose a hinge loss function that is directly related to the classification task as the objective function for dictionary learning. The resulting online learning procedure systematically “pulls” and “pushes” dictionary atoms so that they become better adapted to distinguish between different classes. In addition, the spatial context for a test pixel within its local neighborhood is modeled using a Bayesian graph model and is incorporated with the sparse representation of a single test pixel in a unified probabilistic framework, which enables further refinement of our dictionary to capture the spatial class dependence that complements the spectral information. Experiments on different HSI images demonstrate that the dictionaries optimized using our method can achieve higher classification accuracy with substantially reduced dictionary size than using the whole training set. The proposed method also outperforms existing dictionary learning methods and attains the state-of-the-art results in both the spectral-only and spatial-spectral settings.

This paper reports an innovative pattern recognition technique for fracture microstructure images based on Bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) and nonconvex penalty minimization L q (q = 0.5) regular sparse representation-based classification (NPMLq-SRC) algorithm. The detailed procedures of this work can be divided into three steps, i.e., the preprocessing stage, the feature extraction stage and the image classification stage. We test and validate the proposed method through real data from metallic alloy fracture images. The case verification results show that our proposal can obtain a much higher recognition accuracy than the conventional Back Propagation Neural Networks (BPNN for short), the L1-norm minimization sparse representation-based classification (L1-SRC) and the BEMD combined with L1-norm minimization sparse representation-based classification (BEMD+L1-SRC) methods, respectively. Specifically, the proposed BEMD+NPMLq-SRC (q = 0.5) method outperforms the BEMD+L1-SRC method by 3.33% improvement of the average recognition accuracy, and outperforms L1-SRC method by 14.06% improvement of the average recognition accuracy, respectively.

Single-sample face recognition is one of the most challenging problems in face recognition. We propose a novel algorithm to address this problem based on a sparse representation based classification (SRC) framework. The new algorithm is robust to image misalignment and pixel corruption, and is able to reduce required gallery images to one sample per class. To compensate for the missing illumination information traditionally provided by multiple gallery images, a sparse illumination learning and transfer (SILT) technique is introduced. The illumination in SILT is learned by fitting illumination examples of auxiliary face images from one or more additional subjects with a sparsely-used illumination dictionary. By enforcing a sparse representation of the query image in the illumination dictionary, the SILT can effectively recover and transfer the illumination and pose information from the alignment stage to the recognition stage. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that the new algorithms significantly outperform the state of the art in the single-sample regime and with less restrictions. In particular, the single-sample face alignment accuracy is comparable to that of the well-known Deformable SRC algorithm using multiple gallery images per class. Furthermore, the face recognition accuracy exceeds those of the SRC and Extended SRC algorithms using hand labeled alignment initialization.

The kernel fractional-stop nonlinear discriminant analysis (KF-NDA) method not only extends the fractional-step linear discriminant analysis (F-LDA) method to a nonlinear version, but also further improves the generalization ability of traditional kernel nonlinear discriminant analysis (K-NDA). On the other hand, the Gabor transformed face images exhibit strong characteristics of spatial locality, scale and orientation selectivity, similar to those displayed by Gabor wavelets. Such characteristics produce salient local features that are most suitable for face recognition (FR). Hence, the augmented Gabor feature vector (AGFV) derived from a set of downsampled Gabor wavelet representations of face images is robust to the various of face images and simultaneously exhibits the more discriminatory information. Based on the AGFV and the KF-NDA, a robust feature extraction framework, i.e., the Gabor KF-NDA (GKF-NDA), is proposed for FR. In this framework, the KF-NDA method is directly applied to extract the robust nonlinear feature from the AGFV. Experimental results tested on the popular databases show that the GKF-NDA is more effective than oilier existing FR approaches.

Compared to the traditional Gabor transform, the circularly symmetrical Gabor transform (CSGT) not only retains the characteristics of local and multi-resolution analysis, but also has the remarkable advantages of less redundancy and rotational invariance. Simultaneously, the collaborative representation-based classification with regularized least square (CRC-RLS) overcomes the shortcoming of the high computational complexity in the sparse representation-based classification (SRC). However, both classification algorithms still use the global features of the image, ignoring the importance of local features in the face images. In this paper, the face images are first mapped onto the CSGT domain, and then the amplitude images are chosen as the sample images. Finally, CRC is used to classify different faces. The experimental results on AR, FERET and Extended Yale B face databases show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher recognition rates and better robustness.