Image-to-Set Face Recognition Using Locality Repulsion Projections and Sparse Reconstruction-Based Similarity Measure

For many practical face recognition systems such as law enforcement, e-passport, and ID card identification, there is usually only a single sample per person (SSPP) enrolled in these systems, and many existing face recognition methods may fail to work well because there are not enough samples for discriminative feature extraction in this scenario. However, the probe samples of these face recognition systems are usually captured on the spot, and it is possible to collect multiple face images per person for on-location probing, which is potentially useful to improve the recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a method based on locality repulsion projections (LRP) and a sparse reconstruction-based similarity measure (SRSM) to address the problem of SSPP face recognition using multiple probe images. The LRP method is motivated by our observation that similar face images from different people may lie in a locality in the feature space and cause misclassifications. We design the method with the aim of separating the samples of different classes within a neighborhood through subspace projections for easier classification. To better characterize the similarity between each gallery face and the probe image set, we propose a SRSM method for assigning a label to each probe image set. Experimental results on five widely used face datasets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.