Robust recognition of noisy and partially occluded faces using iteratively reweighted fitting of Eigenfaces

Abstract

Robust recognition of noisy and partially occluded faces is essential for an automated face recognition system, but most appearance-based methods (e.g., Eigenfaces) are sensitive to these factors. In this paper, we propose to address this problem using an iteratively reweighted fitting of the Eigenfaces method (IRF-Eigenfaces). Unlike Eigenfaces fitting, in which a simple linear projection operation is used to extract the feature vector, the IRF-Eigenfaces method first defines a generalized objective function and then uses the iteratively reweighted least-squares (IRLS) fitting algorithm to extract the feature vector by minimizing the generalized objective function. Our simulated and experimental results on the AR database show that IRF-Eigenfaces is far superior to both Eigenfaces and to the local probabilistic method in recognizing noisy and partially occluded faces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.