Cross-pose Face Recognition by Canonical Correlation Analysis

The pose problem is one of the bottlenecks in automatic face recognition. We argue that one of the difficulties in this problem is the severe misalignment in face images or feature vectors with different poses. In this paper, we propose that this problem can be statistically solved or at least mitigated by maximizing the intra-subject across-pose correlations via canonical correlation analysis (CCA). In our method, based on the data set with coupled face images of the same identities and across two different poses, CCA learns simultaneously two linear transforms, each for one pose. In the transformed subspace, the intra-subject correlations between the different poses are maximized, which implies pose-invariance or pose-robustness is achieved. The experimental results show that our approach could considerably improve the recognition performance. And if further enhanced with holistic+local feature representation, the performance could be comparable to the state-of-the-art.