Graph discriminant analysis on multi-manifold (GDAMM): A novel super-resolution method for face recognition

How to efficiently recognize low-resolution (LR) probe images of one face recognition system, in which high-resolution (HR) gallery of faces is enrolled, is still an open problem. In this paper, we develop a novel super-resolution method, namely Graph Discriminant Analysis on Multi-Manifold (GDAMM), to super-resolved the HR version of a LR probe image and then perform matching at the resolution of the HR gallery. Unlike classical super-resolution approaches considering only the data fidelity, GDAMM takes the advantages of both manifold learning and discriminant analysis to integrate the data constraint and discriminant constraint, seeking the mapping between LR images and HR ones. In the reconstructed HR image space, faces of one person in the same manifold are close and those in different manifolds are far apart. Experiments on Extended Yale-B database and AR face database demonstrate that the learned discriminant information is essential for improving recognition accuracy. Through the contrastive experiment, the results (recognition rates) indicate that the proposed GDAMM method can greatly surpass classical super-resolution approaches, even outperforming the ideal case of having probe images of HR gallery by a big margin (nearly 9% on Extended Yale-B database and 8% on AR face database).