  A key recent advance in face recognition models a test face image as a sparse
linear combination of a set of training face images. The resulting sparse
representations have been shown to possess robustness against a variety of
distortions like random pixel corruption, occlusion and disguise. This approach
however makes the restrictive (in many scenarios) assumption that test faces
must be perfectly aligned (or registered) to the training data prior to
classification. In this paper, we propose a simple yet robust local block-based
sparsity model, using adaptively-constructed dictionaries from local features
in the training data, to overcome this misalignment problem. Our approach is
inspired by human perception: we analyze a series of local discriminative
features and combine them to arrive at the final classification decision. We
propose a probabilistic graphical model framework to explicitly mine the
conditional dependencies between these distinct sparse local features. In
particular, we learn discriminative graphs on sparse representations obtained
from distinct local slices of a face. Conditional correlations between these
sparse features are first discovered (in the training phase), and subsequently
exploited to bring about significant improvements in recognition rates.
Experimental results obtained on benchmark face databases demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in the presence of multiple
registration errors (such as translation, rotation, and scaling) as well as
under variations of pose and illumination.
