Automatic Denoising of 2D Color Face Images Using Recursive PCA Reconstruction

In this paper, we propose a denoising method based on PCA reconstruction for removing complex color noise components on human faces, which is not easy to remove by using vectorial color filters. The proposed method is composed of the following six steps: training of canonical eigenface space using PCA, automatic extraction of facial features using active appearance model and alignment of the input face to mean shape, reconstruction of an initial noise free face, relighting of reconstructed face using a bilateral filter, extraction of noise regions using the variances of skin color of training data, and reconstruction using partial information of input images (except the noise regions) and blending of the reconstructed image with the original image. Experimental results show that the proposed denoising method maintains the structural characteristics of input faces, while efficiently removing noise components with complex colors.