Robust supervised sparse representation for face recognition.

Sparse representation based classification (SRC) has become a popular methodology in face recognition in recent years. One widely used manner is to enforce minimum l 1 -norm on coding coefficient vector, which is considered as an unsupervised sparsity constraint and usually requires high computational cost. On the other hand, supervised sparsity representation based method (SSR) realizes sparse representation classification with higher efficiency by multiple phases of representing a probe. Nevertheless, since previous SSR methods only deal with Gaussian noise, they cannot satisfy empirical face recognition application which faces wide variations. In this paper, we propose a robust supervised sparse representation (RSSR) model, which uses two-phase of robust representation to compute a sparse coding vector. Huber loss is employed as the fidelity term in the linear representation, which improves the competitiveness of correct class in the first phase. Then training samples with weak competitiveness are removed by supervised way. In the second phase, the competitiveness of correct class is further boosted by Huber loss. We compare the RSSR with other state-of-the-art methods under different conditions, including illumination variations, gesture changes, expressions, corruptions, and occlusions. Comprehensive experiments on four open databases demonstrate the robustness of RSSR and competitive performance is obtained in dealing with face images with occlusion or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]