Improving face recognition in low quality video sequences: Single frame vs multi-frame super-resolution

Re-Identification aims to detect the presence of a subject spotted in one video in other videos. Traditional methods use information extracted from single frames like color, clothes, etc. A sequence in time domain of consecutive subject images could contain a greater amount of information compared with a single image of the same subject. Typically, these sequences are taken from surveillance cameras at very poor resolution. Even with modern cameras the resolution can be a problem when dealing with a subject who is far from the camera. A possible way of handling low resolution images is by using a multi-frame super-resolution algorithm. Multi-frame super-resolution image reconstruction aims at obtaining a high-resolution image by fusing a set of low-resolution images. Low-resolution images are usually subject to some degradation which causes substantial information loss. Therefore, contiguous images in a sequence could be viewed as a degraded version (SR image) of an image at higher resolution (HR image). Using a multi-frame SR algorithm could achieve a restoration of the HR image. This work aims to investigate the possibility of using a multi-frame super-resolution algorithm to enhance the performance of a classic re-identification system by exploiting information provided by video sequences made available by a video surveillance system. In the case that the SR technique employed results in an effective performance enhancement, we intend to show empirically how many match frames are required to have an effective improvement.