Methods and software for hallucinating facial features by prioritizing reconstruction errors

Abstract

Identifying a masked suspect is one of the toughest challenges in biometrics that exist. This is an important problem faced in many law-enforcement applications on almost a daily basis. In such situations, investigators often only have access to the periocular region of a suspect's face and, unfortunately, conventional commercial matchers are unable to process these images in such a way that the suspect can be identified. Herein, a practical method to hallucinate a full frontal face given only a periocular region of a face is presented. This approach reconstructs the entire frontal face based on an image of an individual's periocular region. By using an approach based on a modified sparsifying dictionary learning algorithm, faces can be effectively reconstructed more accurately than with conventional methods. Further, various methods presented herein are open set, and thus can reconstruct faces even if the algorithms are not specifically trained using those faces.