Robust local features for remote face recognition

In this paper, we propose a robust local descriptor for face recognition. It consists of two components, one based on a shearlet-decomposition and the other on local binary pattern (LBP). Shearlets can completely analyze the singular structures of piecewise smooth images, which is useful since singularities and irregular structures carry useful information in an underlying image. Furthermore, LBP is effective for describing the edges extracted by shearlets even when the images contain high level of noise. Experimental results using the Face Recognition Grand Challenge dataset show that the proposed local descriptor significantly outperforms many widely used features (e.g., Gabor and deep learning-based features) when the images are corrupted by random noise, demonstrating robustness to noise. In addition, experimental results show promising results for two challenging datasets which have poor image quality, i.e., a remote face dataset and the Point and Shoot Face Recognition Challenge dataset.