Random faces guided sparse many-to-one encoder for pose-invariant face recognition

One of the most challenging task in face recognition is to identify people with varied poses. Namely, the test faces have significantly different poses compared with the registered faces. In this paper, we propose a high-level feature learning scheme to extract pose-invariant identity feature for face recognition. First, we build a single-hidden-layer neural network with sparse constraint, to extract pose-invariant feature in a supervised fashion. Second, we further enhance the discriminative capability of the proposed feature by using multiple random faces as the target values for multiple encoders. By enforcing the target values to be unique for input faces over different poses, the learned high-level feature that is represented by the neurons in the hidden layer is pose free and only relevant to the identity information. Finally, we conduct face identification on CMU Multi-PIE, and verification on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) databases, where identification rank-1 accuracy and face verification accuracy with ROC curve are reported. These experiments demonstrate that our model is superior to other state-of-the-art approaches on handling pose variations.