Variability compensation using NAP for unconstrained face recognition

Abstract

The variability presented in unconstrained environments represents one of the open challenges in automated face recognition systems. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature to cope with this problem, most of them tailored to compensate one specific source of variability, e.g., illumination or pose. In this paper we present a general variability compensation scheme based on the Nuisance Attribute Projection (NAP) that can be applied to compensate for any kind of variability factors that affects the face recognition performance. Our technique reduces the intra-class variability by finding a low dimensional variability subspace. This approach is assessed on a database from the NIST still face recognition challenge "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (GBU). The results achieved using our implementation of a state-of-the-art system based on sparse representation are improved significantly by incorporating our variability compensation technique. These results are also compared to the GBU challenge results, highlighting the benefits of adequate variability compensation schemes in these kind of uncontrolled environments. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.