A Double-Deep Spatio-Angular Learning Framework for Light Field based Face Recognition.

Face recognition has attracted increasing attention due to its wide range of applications but it is still challenging when facing large variations in the biometric data characteristics. Lenslet light field cameras have recently come into prominence to capture rich spatio-angular information, thus offering new possibilities for designing advanced biometric recognition systems. This paper proposes a double-deep spatio-angular learning framework for light field based face recognition, which is able to learn convolutional representations and angular dynamics from a light field image; this is a novel recognition framework that has never been proposed before for either face recognition or any other visual recognition task. The proposed double-deep learning framework includes a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent network whose inputs are VGG-Face descriptions, computed using a VGG-Very-Deep-16 convolutional neural network (CNN) for different face viewpoints rendered from the full light field image, which are organised as a pseudo-video sequence. A comprehensive set of experiments has been conducted with the IST-EURECOM light field face database, for varied and challenging recognition tasks. Results show that the proposed framework achieves superior face recognition performance when compared to the state-of-the-art.