Face occlusion detection and recovery using fuzzy c-means

Abstract EN

This paper presents a framework to detect and recover the occluded facial region.

We based on fact that any face has symmetric and not symmetric facial features and all these symmetric facial features are consistent with the shape of the face.

So that, if there is an occlusion in one half of the input face image, then the second half is used to recover the occlusion.

Using symmetry feature of the face makes the recovered face very close to the original face image in terms of pixel values and in general appearance.

In other side when features do not symmetric, the occlusion can not be recovered using the symmetry feature of the face as the case the mouth region is occluded, so the images database is used to select from it the most similar face images to the occluded face image to use it to select similar face to recover occlusion.

In current work, we first detect the occluded face image by using pixel based skin color segmentation and eye template matching.

Then, using fuzzy c-means to detect occlusion.

Finally, the procedure for recovery is implemented.

The results shows that the proposed algorithm provides an effective solution to solve the problem of face occlusion.

This work can used in many applications as in repair the important persons historic image and archive image which we get results reaches to 73 % of identical to original image which has 40 % occluded.