• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.2547-2567
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• 2021

It has been widely acknowledged that occlusion impairments adversely distress many face recognition algorithms' performance. Therefore, it is crucial to solving the problem of face image occlusion in face recognition. To solve the image occlusion problem in face recognition, this paper aims to automatically de-occlude the human face majority or discriminative regions to improve face recognition performance. To achieve this, we decompose the generative process into two key stages and employ a separate generative adversarial network (GAN)-based network in both stages. The first stage generates an initial coarse face image without an occlusion mask. The second stage refines the result from the first stage by forcing it closer to real face images or ground truth. To increase the performance and minimize the artifacts in the generated result, a new refine loss (e.g., reconstruction loss, perceptual loss, and adversarial loss) is used to determine all differences between the generated de-occluded face image and ground truth. Furthermore, we build occluded face images and corresponding occlusion-free face images dataset. We trained our model on this new dataset and later tested it on real-world face images. The experiment results (qualitative and quantitative) and the comparative study confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed work in removing challenging occlusion masks with various structures, sizes, shapes, types, and positions.