Abstract:
'e drift towards face-based recognition systems can be attributed to recent advances in supportive technology and emerging
areas of application including voting systems, access control, human-computer interactions, entertainments, and crime control.
Despite the obvious advantages of such systems being less intrusive and requiring minimal cooperation of subjects, the performances of their underlying recognition algorithms are challenged by the quality of face images, usually acquired from
uncontrolled environments with poor illuminations, varying head poses, ageing, facial expressions, and occlusions. Although
several researchers have leveraged on the property of bilateral symmetry to reconstruct half-occluded face images, their approach
becomes deficient in the presence of random occlusions. In this paper, we harnessed the benefits of the multiple imputation by the
chained equation technique and image denoising using Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWTs) to reconstruct degraded face images
with random missing pixels. Numerical evaluation of the study algorithm gave a perfect (100%) average recognition rate each for
recognition of occluded and augmented face images. 'e study also revealed that the average recognition rate for the augmented
face images (75.5811) was significantly lower than the average recognition rate (430.7153) of the occluded face images. MICE
augmentation is recommended as a suitable data enhancement mechanism for imputing missing data/pixel of occluded
face images.
