Face recognition with occlusions in the training and testing sets

Partial occlusions in face images pose a great problem for most face recognition algorithms. Several solutions to this problem have been proposed over the years - ranging from dividing the face image into a set of local regions to sophisticated statistical methods. In the present paper, we pose the problem as a reconstruction one. In this approach, each test image is described as a linear combination of the training samples in each class. The class samples providing the best reconstruction determine the class label. Here, ldquobest reconstructionrdquo means that reconstruction providing the smallest matching error when using an appropriate metric to compare the reconstructed and test images. A key point in our formulation is to base this reconstruction solely on the visible data in the training and testing sets. This allows to have partial occlusions in both the training and testing samples, while previous methods only dealt with occlusions in the testing set. We show extensive experimental results using a large variety of comparative studies, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed approach over the state of the art.