Structured sparse error coding for face recognition with occlusion

Face recognition with occlusion is common in the real world. Inspired by the works of structured sparse representation, we try to explore the structure of the error incurred by occlusion from two aspects: the error morphology and the error distribution. Since human beings recognize the occlusion mainly according to its region shape or profile without knowing accurately what the occlusion is, we argue that the shape of the occlusion is also an important feature. We propose a morphological graph model to describe the morphological structure of the error. Due to the uncertainty of the occlusion, the distribution of the error incurred by occlusion is also uncertain. However, we observe that the unoccluded part and the occluded part of the error measured by the correntropy induced metric follow the exponential distribution, respectively. Incorporating the two aspects of the error structure, we propose the structured sparse error coding for face recognition with occlusion. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is more stable and has higher breakdown point in dealing with the occlusion problems in face recognition as compared to the related state-of-the-art methods, especially for the extreme situation, such as the high level occlusion and the low feature dimension.