Face recognition on low quality surveillance images, by compensating degradation

Abstract

Face images obtained by an outdoor surveillance camera, are often confronted with severe degradations (e.g., low-resolution, low-contrast, blur and noise). This significantly limits the performance of face recognition (FR) systems. This paper presents a framework to overcome the degradation in images obtained by an outdoor surveillance camera, to improve the performance of FR. We have defined a measure that is based on the difference in intensity histograms of face images, to estimate the amount of degradation. In the past, super-resolution techniques have been proposed to increase the image resolution for face recognition. In this work, we attempt a combination of partial restoration (using super-resolution, interpolation etc.) of probe samples (long distance shots of outdoor) and simulated degradation of gallery samples (indoor shots). Due to the unavailability of any benchmark face database with gallery and probe images, we have built our own database and conducted experiments on a realistic surveillance face database. PCA and FLDA have been used as baseline face recognition classifiers. The aim is to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method of compensating the degradation in surveillance data, rather than designing a specific classifier space suited for degraded test probes. The efficiency of the method is shown by improvement in the face classification accuracy, while comparing results obtained separately using training with acquired indoor gallery samples and then testing with the outdoor probes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.