Face recognition performance with superresolution.

With the prevalence of surveillance systems, face recognition is crucial to aiding the law enforcement community and homeland security in identifying suspects and suspicious individuals on watch lists. However, face recognition performance is severely affected by the low face resolution of individuals in typical surveillance footage, oftentimes due to the distance of individuals from the cameras as well as the small pixel count of low-cost surveillance systems. Superresolution image reconstruction has the potential to improve face recognition performance by using a sequence of low-resolution images of an individual's face in the same pose to reconstruct a more detailed high-resolution facial image. This work conducts an extensive performance evaluation of superresolution for a face recognition algorithm using a methodology and experimental setup consistent with real world settings at multiple subject-to-camera distances. Results show that superresolution image reconstruction improves face recognition performance considerably at the examined midrange and close range.