Face recognition robust to occlusions

In this thesis, we focus on the occlusion problem in automatic face recognition in non-controlled environments. Toward this goal, we propose a framework that consists of applying explicit occlusion analysis and processing to improve face recognition under different occlusion conditions. We demonstrate in this thesis that the proposed framework is more efficient than the methods based on non-explicit occlusion treatments from the literature. We identify two new types of facial occlusions, namely the sparse occlusion and dynamic occlusion. Solutions are presented to handle the identified occlusion problems in more advanced surveillance context. Recently, the emerging Kinect sensor has been successfully applied in many computer vision fields. We introduce this new sensor in the context of face recognition, particularly in presence of occlusions, and demonstrate its efficiency compared with traditional 2D cameras. Finally, we propose two approaches based on 2D and 3D to improve the baseline face recognition techniques. Improving the baseline methods can also have the positive impact on the recognition results when partial occlusion occurs.

 In this thesis, occlusion-robust face recognitions are proposed for different scenarios, so that identification of subjects in non-controlled environments (i.e. video surveillance) becomes more robust in practical conditions.