A novel method for recognizing face with partial occlusion via sparse representation

In this paper, we propose a novel method to recognize the partially occluded face images based on sparse representation. Generally, occlusions, such as glasses and scarf, fall on some random patch of image's pixels of test images, but which is known to be connected. In our method, all images are divided into several blocks and then an indicator based on linear regression technique is presented to determine whether a block is occluded. We utilize those uncontaminated blocks as the new feature of an image. Finally, the sparse representation-based classification (SRC) method serves as the classifier to recognize unknown faces. In the original work of SRC, the extended SRC (eSRC) scheme is presented to deal with occlusions, which has very heavy computational cost. The experimental results show that our method can achieve good recognition accuracy and has much lower computational cost than eSRC. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.