Historical Blurry Video-Based Face Recognition

Face recognition is a widely used computer vision, which plays an increasingly important role in user authentication systems, security systems, and consumer electronics. The models for most current applications are based on high-definition digital cameras. In this paper, we focus on digital images derived from historical motion picture films. Historical motion picture films often have poorer resolution than modern digital imagery, making face detection a more challenging task. To approach this problem, we first propose a trunk-branch concatenated multi-task cascaded convolutional neural network (TB-MTCNN), which efficiently extracts facial features from blurry historical films by combining the trunk with branch networks and employing various sizes of kernels to enrich the multi-scale receptive field. Next, we build a deep neural network-integrated object-tracking algorithm to compensate for failed recognition over one or more video frames. The framework combines simple online and real-time tracking with deep data association (Deep SORT), and TB-MTCNN with the residual neural network (ResNet) model. Finally, a state-of-the-art image restoration method is employed to reduce the effect of noise and blurriness. The experimental results show that our proposed joint face recognition and tracking network can significantly reduce missed recognition in historical motion picture film frames.