A sparse representation approach to face matching across plastic surgery

Plastic surgery procedures can significantly alter facial appearance, thereby posing a serious challenge even to the state-of-the-art face matching algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the challenges involved in automatic matching of faces across plastic surgery variations. In the proposed formulation, part-wise facial characterization is combined with the recently popular sparse representation approach to address these challenges. The sparse representation approach requires several images per subject in the gallery to function effectively which is often not available in several use-cases, as in the problem we address in this work. The proposed formulation utilizes images from sequestered non-gallery subjects with similar local facial characteristics to fulfill this requirement. Extensive experiments conducted on a recently introduced plastic surgery database [17] consisting of 900 subjects highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach.