Although face recognition systems have achieved impressive performance in recent years, the low-resolution face recognition task remains challenging, especially when the low-resolution faces are captured under non-ideal conditions, which is widely prevalent in surveillance-based applications. Faces captured in such conditions are often contaminated by blur, non-uniform lighting, and non-frontal face pose. In this paper, we analyze the face recognition techniques using data captured under low-quality conditions in the wild. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the experimental results for two of the most important applications in real surveillance applications, and demonstrate practical approaches to handle both cases that show promising performance. The following three contributions are made: (i) we conduct experiments to evaluate super-resolution methods for low-resolution face recognition; (ii) we study face re-identification on various public face datasets, including real surveillance and low-resolution subsets of large-scale datasets, presenting a baseline result for several deep learning-based approaches, and improve them by introducing a generative adversarial network pre-training approach and fully convolutional architecture; and (iii) we explore the low-resolution face identification by employing a state-of-the-art supervised discriminative learning approach. The evaluations are conducted on challenging portions of the SCface and UCCSface datasets.

Person re-identification (ReID) is the task of automatically matching persons across surveillance cameras with location or time differences. Nearly all proposed ReID approaches exploit body features. Even if successfully captured in the scene, faces are often assumed to be unhelpful to the ReID process[3]. As cameras and surveillance systems improve, ‘Facial ReID’ approaches deserve attention. The following contributions are made in this work: 1) We describe a high-quality dataset for person re-identification featuring faces. This dataset was collected from a real surveillance network in a municipal rapid transit system, and includes the same people appearing in multiple sites at multiple times wearing different attire. 2) We employ new DNN architectures and patch matching techniques to handle face misalignment in quality regimes where landmarking fails. We further boost the performance by adopting the fully convolutional structure and spatial pyramid pooling (SPP).