A New Virtual Samples-Based CRC Method for Face Recognition

The research of automatic face recognition has attracted much attention from many researchers because of human faces’ uniqueness and usability. However, in the real-world applications, the acquisition equipment of face images is affected by illumination changes, facial expression variations, different postures and other environment factors, resulting in limited number of face images collected. This situation has become an obstacle to the development of face recognition technology. Therefore, in this paper, we utilize the information of the left-half face and right-half face to generate respectively two virtual ‘axis-symmetrical’ face images from an original face image and adopt collaborative representation based classification method (CRC) to perform classification. The first and second virtual face images convey more information of the right-half face and left-half face, respectively. Experiments have been performed on the Extended Yale_B, ORL, AR and FERET face databases and the experimental results show that our method can improve the recognition accuracy effectively.