Virtual View Generation Using Clustering Based Local View Transition Model

This paper presents an approach for realistic virtual view generation using appearance clustering based local view transition model, with its target application on cross-pose face recognition. Previously, the traditional global pattern based view transition model (VTM) method was extended to its local version called LVTM, which learns the linear transformation of pixel values between frontal and non-frontal image pairs using partial image in a small region for each location, rather than transforming the entire image pattern. In this paper, we show that the accuracy of the appearance transition model and the recognition rate can be further improved by better exploiting the inherent linear relationship between frontal-nonfrontal face image patch pairs. For each specific location, instead of learning a common transformation as in the LVTM, the corresponding local patches are first clustered based on appearance similarity distance metric and then the transition models are learned separately for each cluster. In the testing stage, each local patch for the input non-frontal probe image is transformed using the learned local view transition model corresponding to the most visually similar cluster. The experimental results on a real-world face dataset demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method in terms of recognition rate.