Comparative Study Based on De-Occlusion and Reconstruction of Face Images in Degraded Conditions

Abstract

In the recent years, the face recognition task has attracted the attention of researchers due to its efficiency in several domains such as surveillance and access control. Unfortunately, there are multiple challenges that decrease the performance of face recognition. Partial occlusion is the most challenging one since it often causes a great lack of information. The main purpose of this paper is to prove that facial reconstruction improves the results of facial recognition compared to de-occlusion and full-face recognition in the presence of occlusion. Our objective is to achieve occluded-face recognition, de-occluded-face recognition, and reconstructed-face recognition. Regarding face reconstruction, we introduce two different methods based on Laplacian pyramid blending and CycleGANs. In order to validate our work, we perform two different feature extraction techniques: hand-crafted features and learned features exploiting the final layers of a pre-trained deep architecture model. The experimental results on the EURECOM Kinect Face Dataset (EKFD) and the ISTEURECOM Light Field Face Database (IST-EURECOM LFFD) show that the proposed face reconstruction approach, compared with the face de-occlusion and occluded-face recognition ones, clearly improves the face recognition task. Our method boosts the classification performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods, achieving 94.66% on EKFD and 72.35% on IST-EURECOM LFFD.