We present a robust elastic and partial matching metric
for face recognition. To handle challenges such as pose, facial
expression and partial occlusion, we enable both elastic
and partial matching by computing a part based face
representation. In which N local image descriptors are extracted
from densely sampled overlapping image patches.
We then define a distance metric where each descriptor in
one face is matched against its spatial neighborhood in the
other face and the minimal distance is recorded. For implicit
partial matching, the list of all minimal distances are
sorted in ascending order and the distance at the αN-th
position is picked up as the final distance. The parameter
0 ≤ α ≤ 1 controls how much occlusion, facial expression
changes, or pixel degradations we would allow. The optimal
parameter values of this new distance metric are extensively
studied and identified with real-life photo collections.
We also reveal that filtering the face image by a s...