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Explicit and implicit employment of edge-related information in super-resolving distant faces for recognition

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Abstract

Edges and related features play significant role in discriminating face images. But those features are not enough informative when the face images are captured from a distance (e.g., video surveillance). Traditionally, those features are enhanced by super-resolving low-resolution grayscale face images. In this paper, we demonstrate a superior performance by directly considering such features (continuous gradient value, also known as edginess) in the super-resolution process. Edginess features are extracted using 1-D processing of image. This process is carried out along different directions to obtain partial evidences, which are combined to detect the person’s identity. Here, super-resolution of the face image and its recognition has been performed in sparse domain framework. The explicit usage of edginess feature in the proposed approach shows considerable improvement in both recognition performance as well as computational time, as only the patches related to strong edges are considered for super-resolution. In addition to that, the edginess feature gives improved recognition rate when it is preserved implicitly during super-resolution in grayscale domain.

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Notes

  1. Here, feature means edginess feature for edginess domain and grayscale values for grayscale domain.

  2. Here, we have considered all the angles with respect to x-axis in clockwise direction.

  3. Here, \(\bf {x}\) is representation of face image and it could be gray-level values or partial edge evidences.

  4. The edginess values are normalized to the range 0–255.

  5. Computational time is measured under same system condition for both types of SR.

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  1. School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Mandi, HP, India

    Srimanta Mandal & Anil Kumar Sao

  2. FotoNation Ltd., Parkmore East, Ballybrit, Galway, Ireland

    Shejin Thavalengal

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  1. Srimanta Mandal
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Mandal, S., Thavalengal, S. & Sao, A.K. Explicit and implicit employment of edge-related information in super-resolving distant faces for recognition. Pattern Anal Applic 19, 867–884 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-015-0512-0

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