Occlusion invariant face recognition using mean based weight matrix and support vector machine

In this paper, a novel occlusion invariant face recognition algorithm based on Mean based weight matrix (MBWM) technique is proposed. The proposed algorithm is composed of two phases-the occlusion detection phase and the MBWM based face recognition phase. A feature based approach is used to effectively detect partial occlusions for a given input face image. The input face image is first divided into a finite number of disjointed local patches, and features are extracted for each patch, and the occlusion present is detected. Features obtained from the corresponding occlusion-free patches of training images are used for face image recognition. The SVM classifier is used for occlusion detection for each patch. In the recognition phase, the MBWM bases of occlusion-free image patches are used for face recognition. Euclidean nearest neighbour rule is applied for the matching. GTAV face database that includes many occluded face images by sunglasses and hand are used for the experiment. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed local patch-based occlusion detection technique works well and the MBWM based method shows superior performance to other conventional approaches.