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Converted-face identification: using synthesized images to replace original images for recognition

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Abstract

The changes in appearance of faces, usually caused by pose, expression and illumination variations, increase data uncertainty in the task of face recognition. Insufficient training samples cannot provide abundant multi-view observations of a face. To address this issue, many pioneering works focus on generating virtual training images for better recognition performance. However, the issue also exists in a test set where a test image only conveys a split-second representation of a face and cannot cover more comprehensive features. In this paper, we propose a new face synthesis method for face recognition. In the proposed pipeline, we synthesize a virtual image using both the original image and its corresponding mirror one. Note that, we apply this technique both to the training and test sets. Then we use the newly generated training and test images to replace the original ones for face recognition. The aim is to increase the similarity between a test image and its corresponding intra-class training images. This proposed method is effective and computationally efficient. In order to verify this, we tested our system using multiple face recognition methods in terms of the recognition accuracy, based on either the synthesized images or original images. The methods used in the paper include statistical subspace learning algorithms and representation-based classification approaches. Experimental results obtained on FERET, ORL, GT, PIE and LFW show that the proposed approach improves the face recognition accuracy, especially on faces with left-right pose variations.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 61373055), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant nos. BK2012700, BK20130473), the Foundation of Artificial Intelligence Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province (Grant no. 2012RZY02), the Open Project Program of the State Key Lab of CAD&CG of Zhejiang University (Grant no. A1418) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. JUSRP115A29, JUSRP51410B).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, 212003, China

    Changbin Shao & Xin Shu

  2. School of Internet of Things Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, 214122, China

    Xiaoning Song & Xiao-Jun Wu

  3. Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK

    Xiaoning Song

Authors
  1. Changbin Shao
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  2. Xiaoning Song
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  3. Xin Shu
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  4. Xiao-Jun Wu
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Correspondence to Xiaoning Song.

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Shao, C., Song, X., Shu, X. et al. Converted-face identification: using synthesized images to replace original images for recognition. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 6641–6661 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3349-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3349-7

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