This paper designs a high-performance deep convolutional network (DeepID2+) for face recognition. It is learned with the identification-verification supervisory signal. By increasing the dimension of hidden representations and adding supervision to early convolutional layers, DeepID2+ achieves new state-of-the-art on LFW and YouTube Faces benchmarks. Through empirical studies, we have discovered three properties of its deep neural activations critical for the high performance: sparsity, selectiveness and robustness. (1) It is observed that neural activations are moderately sparse. Moderate sparsity maximizes the discriminative power of the deep net as well as the distance between images. It is surprising that DeepID2+ still can achieve high recognition accuracy even after the neural responses are binarized. (2) Its neurons in higher layers are highly selective to identities and identity-related attributes. We can identify different subsets of neurons which are either constantly excited or inhibited when different identities or attributes are present. Although DeepID2+ is not taught to distinguish attributes during training, it has implicitly learned such high-level concepts. (3) It is much more robust to occlusions, although occlusion patterns are not included in the training set.
As a recently proposed technique, sparse representation based classification (SRC) has been widely used for face recognition (FR). SRC first codes a testing sample as a sparse linear combination of all the training samples, and then classifies the testing sample by evaluating which class leads to the minimum representation error. While the importance of sparsity is much emphasized in SRC and many related works, the use of collaborative representation (CR) in SRC is ignored by most literature. However, is it really the l 1 -norm sparsity that improves the FR accuracy? This paper devotes to analyze the working mechanism of SRC, and indicates that it is the CR but not the l1-norm sparsity that makes SRC powerful for face classification. Consequently, we propose a very simple yet much more efficient face classification scheme, namely CR based classification with regularized least square (CRC_RLS). The extensive experiments clearly show that CRC_RLS has very competitive classification results, while it has significantly less complexity than SRC. We consider the problem of automatically recognizing human faces from frontal views with varying expression and illumination, as well as occlusion and disguise. We cast the recognition problem as one of classifying among multiple linear regression models and argue that new theory from sparse signal representation offers the key to addressing this problem. Based on a sparse representation computed by C1-minimization, we propose a general classification algorithm for (image-based) object recognition. This new framework provides new insights into two crucial issues in face recognition: feature extraction and robustness to occlusion. For feature extraction, we show that if sparsity in the recognition problem is properly harnessed, the choice of features is no longer critical. What is critical, however, is whether the number of features is sufficiently large and whether the sparse representation is correctly computed. Unconventional features such as downsampled images and random projections perform just as well as conventional features such as eigenfaces and Laplacianfaces, as long as the dimension of the feature space surpasses certain threshold, predicted by the theory of sparse representation. This framework can handle errors due to occlusion and corruption uniformly by exploiting the fact that these errors are often sparse with respect to the standard (pixel) basis. The theory of sparse representation helps predict how much occlusion the recognition algorithm can handle and how to choose the training images to maximize robustness to occlusion. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available databases to verify the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and corroborate the above claims. Sparse representation based classification (SRC) methods have recently drawn much attention in face recognition, due to their good performance and robustness against misalignment, illumination variation, and occlusion. They assume the errors caused by image variations can be modeled as pixel-wisely sparse. However, in many practical scenarios these errors are not truly pixel-wisely sparse but rather sparsely distributed with structures, i.e., they constitute contiguous regions distributed at different face positions. In this paper, we introduce a class of structured sparsity-inducing norms into the SRC framework, to model various corruptions in face images caused by misalignment, shadow (due to illumination change), and occlusion. For practical face recognition, we develop an automatic face alignment method based on minimizing the structured sparsity norm. Experiments on benchmark face datasets show improved performance over SRC and other alternative methods. While Boltzmann Machines have been successful at unsupervised learning and density modeling of images and speech data, they can be very sensitive to noise in the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel model, the Robust Boltzmann Machine (RoBM), which allows Boltzmann Machines to be robust to corruptions. In the domain of visual recognition, the RoBM is able to accurately deal with occlusions and noise by using multiplicative gating to induce a scale mixture of Gaussians over pixels. Image denoising and in-painting correspond to posterior inference in the RoBM. Our model is trained in an unsupervised fashion with unlabeled noisy data and can learn the spatial structure of the occluders. Compared to standard algorithms, the RoBM is significantly better at recognition and denoising on several face databases.  It has been of great interest to find sparse and or nonnegative representations in computer vision literature. In this paper we propose a novel method to such a purpose and refer to it as nonnegative curds and whey (NNCW). The NNCW procedure consists of two stages. In the first stage we consider a set of sparse and nonnegative representations of a test image, each of which is a linear combination of the images within a certain class, by solving a set of regressiontype nonnegative matrix factorization problems. In the second stage we incorporate these representations into a new sparse and nonnegative representation by using the group nonnegative garrote. This procedure is particularly appropriate for discriminant analysis owing to its supervised and nonnegativity nature in sparsity pursuing. Experiments on several benchmark face databases and Caltech 101 image dataset demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our nonnegative curds and whey method. 