Towards Pose Robust Face Recognition

Most existing pose robust methods are too computational complex to meet practical applications and their performance under unconstrained environments are rarely evaluated. In this paper, we propose a novel method for pose robust face recognition towards practical applications, which is fast, pose robust and can work well under unconstrained environments. Firstly, a 3D deformable model is built and a fast 3D model fitting algorithm is proposed to estimate the pose of face image. Secondly, a group of Gabor filters are transformed according to the pose and shape of face image for feature extraction. Finally, PCA is applied on the pose adaptive Gabor features to remove the redundances and Cosine metric is used to evaluate the similarity. The proposed method has three advantages: (1) The pose correction is applied in the filter space rather than image space, which makes our method less affected by the precision of the 3D model; (2) By combining the holistic pose transformation and local Gabor filtering, the final feature is robust to pose and other negative factors in face recognition; (3) The 3D structure and facial symmetry are successfully used to deal with self-occlusion. Extensive experiments on FERET and PIE show the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly, meanwhile, the method works well on LFW.