Recognition of blurred faces using Local Phase Quantization

In this paper, recognition of blurred faces using the recently introduced Local Phase Quantization (LPQ) operator is proposed. LPQ is based on quantizing the Fourier transform phase in local neighborhoods. The phase can be shown to be a blur invariant property under certain commonly fulfilled conditions. In face image analysis, histograms of LPQ labels computed within local regions are used as a face descriptor similarly to the widely used Local Binary Pattern (LBP) methodology for face image description. The experimental results on CMU PIE and FRGC 1.0.4 datasets show that the LPQ descriptor is highly tolerant to blur but still very descriptive outperforming LBP both with blurred and sharp images.