Real Time Face Recognition with limited training data: Feature Transfer Learning integrating CNN and Sparse Approximation

Abstract

It is highly challenging to obtain high performance with limited and unconstrained data in real time face recognition applications. Sparse Approximation is a fast and computationally efficient method for the above application as it requires no training time as compared to deep learning methods. It eliminates the training time by assuming that the test image can be approximated by the sum of individual contributions of the training images from different classes and the class with maximum contribution is closest to the test image. The efficiency of the Sparse Approximation method can be further increased by providing high quality features as input for classification. Hence, we propose to integrate pre-trained CNN architecture to extract the highly discriminative features from the image dataset for Sparse classification. The proposed approach provides better performance even for one training image per class in complex environment as compared to the existing methods. Highlight of the present approach is the results obtained for LFW dataset with one and thirteen training images per class are 84.86% and 96.14% respectively, whereas the existing deep learning methods use a large amount of training data to achieve comparable results.