On Low-Resolution Face Recognition in the Wild: Comparisons and New Techniques

Although face recognition systems have achieved impressive performance in recent years, the low-resolution face recognition task remains challenging, especially when the low-resolution faces are captured under non-ideal conditions, which is widely prevalent in surveillance-based applications. Faces captured in such conditions are often contaminated by blur, non-uniform lighting, and non-frontal face pose. In this paper, we analyze the face recognition techniques using data captured under low-quality conditions in the wild. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the experimental results for two of the most important applications in real surveillance applications, and demonstrate practical approaches to handle both cases that show promising performance. The following three contributions are made: (i) we conduct experiments to evaluate super-resolution methods for low-resolution face recognition; (ii) we study face re-identification on various public face datasets, including real surveillance and low-resolution subsets of large-scale datasets, presenting a baseline result for several deep learning-based approaches, and improve them by introducing a generative adversarial network pre-training approach and fully convolutional architecture; and (iii) we explore the low-resolution face identification by employing a state-of-the-art supervised discriminative learning approach. The evaluations are conducted on challenging portions of the SCface and UCCSface datasets.