An antinoise sparse representation method for robust face recognition via joint l1 and l2 regularization

Sparse representation methods based on l(1) and/or l(2) regularization have shown promising performance in different applications. Previous studies show that the l(1) regularization based representation has more sparse property, while the l(2) regularization based representation is much simpler and faster. However, when dealing with noisy data, both naive l(1) and l(2) regularization suffer from the issue of unsatisfactory robustness. In this paper, we explore the method to implement an antinoise sparse representation method for robust face recognition based on a joint version of l(1) and l(2) regularization. The contributions of this paper are mainly shown in the following aspects. First, a novel objective function combining both l(1) and l(2) regularization is proposed to implement an antinoise sparse representation. An iterative fitting operation via l(1) regularization is integrated with l(2) norm minimization, to obtain an antinoise classification. Second, the rationale how the proposed method produces promising discriminative and antinoise performance for face recognition is analyzed. The l(2) regularization enhances robustness and runs fast, and l(1) regularization helps cope with the noisy data. Third, the classification robustness of the proposed method is demonstrated by extensive experiments on several benchmark facial datasets. The method can be considered as an option for the expert systems for biometrics and other recognition problems facing unstable and noisy data. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.