The fusion of original and symmetric virtual images for image preprocessing in face recognition and collaborative representation based classification

Abstract

Various poses, facial expressions and illuminations are the biggest challenges in the fields of face recognition. To overcome these challenges, we propose a simple yet novel method in this paper by using the approximately symmetrical virtual face. Firstly, based on the symmetrical characteristics of faces, we present the method to generate the virtual faces for all samples in detail. Secondly, the collaborative representation based classification method is performed on both of the original set and virtual set individually. In this way, two kinds of representation residuals of every class can be obtained. Thirdly, an adaptive weighted fusion approach is presented and utilized to integrate those two kinds of representation residuals for face recognition. Lastly, we can obtain the label of the test sample by assigning it to the class with the minimum fused residual. Several experiments are conducted which show that the proposed method not only can greatly improve the classification accuracy, but also can effectively reduce the negative influence of various poses, illuminations, and facial expressions.