Recognition of low-resolution face images using sparse coding of local features

In this paper, we propose a new approach for recognition of low-resolution face images by using sparse coding of local features. The proposed algorithm extracts Gabor features from a low-resolution gallery image and a query image at different scales and orientations, then projects the features separately into a new low-dimensional feature space using sparse coding that preserves the sparse structure of the local features. To determine the similarity between the projected features, a coefficient vector is estimated by using linear regression that determines the relationship between the projected gallery and query features. On the basis of this coefficient vector, residual values will be computed to classify the images. To validate our proposed method, experiments were performed using three databases (ORL, Extended-Yale B, and CAS-PEAL-R1), which contain images with different facial expressions and lighting conditions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms various classical and state-of-the-art face recognition methods.