Robust feature set matching for partial face recognition

Over the past two decades, a number of face recognition methods have been proposed in the literature. Most of them use holistic face images to recognize people. However, human faces are easily occluded by other objects in many real-world scenarios and we have to recognize the person of interest from his/her partial faces. In this paper, we propose a new partial face recognition approach by using feature set matching, which is able to align partial face patches to holistic gallery faces automatically and is robust to occlusions and illumination changes. Given each gallery image and probe face patch, we first detect key points and extract their local features. Then, we propose a Metric Learned Extended Robust Point Matching (MLERPM) method to discriminatively match local feature sets of a pair of gallery and probe samples. Lastly, the similarity of two faces is converted as the distance between two feature sets. Experimental results on three public face databases are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.