Accurate Face Recognition on Highly Compressed Samples

Compressive sensing is an emerging field for low-dimensional data acquisition. Samples are acquired in the compressed domain and utilized for signal reconstruction or as input features for a classifier. In this work, hardware-aware face recognition using compressed samples was investigated. A linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier was exploited with compressed samples as input features; Faces can be reliably recognized with high average accuracy (up to 99%). To assess the robustness of the proposed scheme, three image datasets covering different facial and illumination conditions were analyzed. Random (binary) and structured (Haar-transform-based) measurement matrices were employed for generating compressed samples. For one of the datasets, Extended Yale B, and using a random binary measurement matrix, the proposed scheme achieved 82% accuracy from as few as 15 compressed samples, which means a 1/20480 sensing ratio. Accuracy and compression are also remarkably high with respect to the state-of-the-art for the other two datasets.