Face recognition in uncontrolled conditions using sparse representation and local features

Face recognition in presence of either occlusions, illumination changes or large expression variations is still an open problem. This paper addresses this issue presenting a new local-based face recognition system that combines weak classifiers yielding a strong one. The method relies on sparse approximation using dictionaries built on a pool of local features extracted from automatically cropped images. Experiments on the AR database show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms current state-of-the art techniques.