A pose-wise linear illumination manifold model for face recognition using video

The objective of this work is to recognize faces using video sequences both for training and novel input, in a realistic, unconstrained setup in which lighting, pose and user motion pattern have a wide variability and face images are of low resolution. There are three major areas of novelty: (i) illumination generalization is achieved by combining coarse histogram correction with fine illumination manifold-based normalization; (ii) pose robustness is achieved by decomposing each appearance manifold into semantic Gaussian pose clusters, comparing the corresponding clusters and fusing the results using an RBF network; (iii) a fully automatic recognition system based on the proposed method is described and extensively evaluated on 600 head motion video sequences with extreme illumination, pose and motion pattern variation. On this challenging data set our system consistently demonstrated a very high recognition rate (95% on average), significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods from the literature. ! 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.