Towards a super-resolution based approach for improved face recognition in low resolution environment

The video surveillance activity generates a vast amount of data, which can be processed to detect miscreants. The task of identifying and recognizing an object in surveillance data is intriguing yet difficult due to the low resolution of captured images or video. The super-resolution approach aims to enhance the resolution of an image to generate a desirable high-resolution one. This paper develops a robust real-time face recognition approach that uses super-resolution to improve images and detect faces in the video. Many previously developed face detection systems are constrained by the severe distortion in the captured images. Further, many systems failed to handle the effect of motion, blur, and noise on the images registered on a camera. The presented approach improves descriptor count of the image based on the super-resolved faces and mitigates the effect of noise. Furthermore, it uses a parallel architecture to implement a super-resolution algorithm and overcomes the efficiency drawback increasing face recognition performance. Experimental analysis on the ORL, Caltech, and Chokepoint datasets has been carried out to evaluate the performance of the presented approach. The PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise-Ratio) and face recognition rate are used as the performance measures. The results showed significant improvement in the recognition rates for images where the face didn't contain pose expressions and scale variations. Further, for the complicated cases involving scale, pose, and lighting variations, the presented approach resulted in an improvement of 5%-6% in each case.