Gray-scale super-resolution for face recognition from low Gray-scale resolution face images

Today´s camera sensors usually have a high gray-scale resolution, e.g. 256, however, due to the dramatic lighting variations, the gray-scales distributed to the face region might be far less than 256. Therefore, besides low spatial resolution, a practical face recognition system must also handle degraded face images of low gray-scale resolution (LGR). In the last decade, low spatial resolution problem has been studied prevalently, but LGR problem was rarely studied. Aiming at robust face recognition, this paper makes a first primary attempt to investigate explicitly the LGR problem and empirically reveals that LGR indeed degrades face recognition method significantly. Possible solutions to the problem are discussed and grouped into three categories: gray-scale resolution invariant features, gray-scale degradation modeling and Gray-scale Super-Resolution (GSR). Then, we propose a Coupled Subspace Analysis (CSA) based GSR method to recover the high gray-scale resolution image from a single input LGR image. Extensive experiments on FERET and CMU-PIE face databases show that the proposed method can not only dramatically increase the gray-scale resolution and visualization quality, but also impressively improve the accuracy of face recognition.