A New Integrated Approach Based on the Iterative Super-Resolution Algorithm and Expectation Maximization for Face Hallucination

Abstract

This paper proposed and verified a new integrated approach based on the iterative super-resolution algorithm and expectation-maximization for face hallucination, which is a process of converting a low-resolution face image to a high-resolution image. The current sparse representation for super resolving generic image patches is not suitable for global face images due to its lower accuracy and time-consumption. To solve this, in the new method, training global face sparse representation was used to reconstruct images with misalignment variations after the local geometric co-occurrence matrix. In the testing phase, we proposed a hybrid method, which is a combination of the sparse global representation and the local linear regression using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. Therefore, this work recovered the high-resolution image of a corresponding low-resolution image. Experimental validation suggested improvement of the overall accuracy of the proposed method with fast identification of high-resolution face images without misalignment.