Integrating the original face images and “symmetrical faces” to perform face recognition

Using the original and ‘symmetrical face’ training samples to perform representation based face recognition was first proposed in [1]. It simultaneously used the original and ‘symmetrical face’ training samples to perform a two-step classification and achieved an outstanding classification result. However, in [1] the “symmetrical face” is devised only for one method. In this paper, we do some improvements on the basis of [1] and combine this “symmetrical faces” transformation with several representation based methods. We exploit all original training samples, left “symmetrical face” training samples and right “symmetrical face” training samples for classification and use the score fusion for ultimate face recognition. The symmetry of the face is first used to generate new samples, which is different from original face image but can really reflect some possible appearance of the face. It effectively overcomes the problem of non-sufficient training samples. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can be used to improve a number of traditional representation based methods including those that are not presented in the paper.