Modal Regression-Based Graph Representation for Noise Robust Face Hallucination

Manifold learning-based face hallucination technologies have been widely developed during the past decades. However, the conventional learning methods always become ineffective in noise environment due to the least-square regression, which usually generates distorted representations for noisy inputs they employed for error modeling. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose a modal regression-based graph representation (MRGR) model for noisy face hallucination. In MRGR, the modal regression-based function is incorporated into graph learning framework to improve the resolution of noisy face images. Specifically, the modal regression-induced metric is used instead of the least-square metric to regularize the encoding errors, which admits the MRGR to robust against noise with uncertain distribution. Moreover, a graph representation is learned from feature space to exploit the inherent typological structure of patch manifold for data representation, resulting in more accurate reconstruction coefficients. Besides, for noisy color face hallucination, the MRGR is extended into quaternion (MRGR-Q) space, where the abundant correlations among different color channels can be well preserved. Experimental results on both the grayscale and color face images demonstrate the superiority of MRGR and MRGR-Q compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

I. Introduction

High-quality face images holding unique biometrical patterns are stupendously demanded by video surveillance systems. Unfortunately, the face images observed by sensors in reality are usually noisy and with low resolution due to the hardware limitations and disturbs from the outer environment. Thus, it is necessary and meaningful to improve the image qualities of LR observations by software techniques. Face hallucination is such a technology that aims to forecast high-resolution (HR) face images from the corresponding one or a set of LR face observations.