Manifold Based Face Synthesis from Sparse Samples

Data sparsity has been a thorny issue for manifold-based image synthesis, and in this paper we address this critical problem by leveraging ideas from transfer learning. Specifically, we propose methods based on generating auxiliary data in the form of synthetic samples using transformations of the original sparse samples. To incorporate the auxiliary data, we propose a weighted data synthesis method, which adaptively selects from the generated samples for inclusion during the manifold learning process via a weighted iterative algorithm. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, we apply it to the problem of face image synthesis from sparse samples. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method shows encouraging results with good performance improvements.