Model-Driven Domain Adaptation on Product Manifolds for Unconstrained Face Recognition

Many classification algorithms see a reduction in performance when tested on data with properties different from that used for training. This problem arises very naturally in face recognition where images corresponding to the source domain (gallery, training data) and the target domain (probe, testing data) are acquired under varying degree of factors such as illumination, expression, blur and alignment. In this paper, we account for the domain shift by deriving a latent subspace or domain, which jointly characterizes the multifactor variations using appropriate image formation models for each factor. We formulate the latent domain as a product of Grassmann manifolds based on the underlying geometry of the tensor space, and perform recognition across domain shift using statistics consistent with the tensor geometry. More specifically, given a face image from the source or target domain, we first synthesize multiple images of that subject under different illuminations, blur conditions and 2D perturbations to form a tensor representation of the face. The orthogonal matrices obtained from the decomposition of this tensor, where each matrix corresponds to a factor variation, are used to characterize the subject as a point on a product of Grassmann manifolds. For cases with only one image per subject in the source domain, the identity of target domain faces is estimated using the geodesic distance on product manifolds. When multiple images per subject are available, an extension of kernel discriminant analysis is developed using a novel kernel based on the projection metric on product spaces. Furthermore, a probabilistic approach to the problem of classifying image sets on product manifolds is introduced. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive evaluations on constrained and unconstrained face datasets, including still images and videos.