Histogram-Based CRC for 3D-Aided Pose-Invariant Face Recognition

Traditional Collaborative Representation-based Classification algorithms for face recognition (CRC) usually suffer from data uncertainty, especially if it includes various poses and illuminations. To address this issue, in this paper, we design a new CRC method using histogram statistical measurement (H-CRC) combined with a 3D morphable model (3DMM) for pose-invariant face classification. First, we fit a 3DMM to raw images in the dictionary to reconstruct the 3D shapes and textures. The fitting results are used to render numerous virtual samples of 2D images that are frontalized from arbitrary poses. In contrast to other distance-based evaluation algorithms for collaborative (or sparse) representation-based methods, the histogram information of all the generated 2D face images is subsequently exploited. Second, we use a histogram-based metric learning to evaluate the most similar neighbours of the test sample, which aims to obtain ideal result for pose-invariant face recognition using the designed histogram-based 3DMM model and online pruning strategy, forming a unified 3D-aided CRC framework. The proposed method achieves desirable classification results that are conducted on a set of well-known face databases, including ORL, Georgia Tech, FERET, FRGC, PIE and LFW.