Face Recognition is an active research area. In many practical scenarios, when faces are acquired without the cooperation or knowledge of the subject, they are likely to get occluded. Apart from image background, pose, illumination, and orientation of the faces, occlusion forms an additional challenge for face recognition. Recognizing faces that are partially visible is a challenging task. Most of the solutions to the problem focus on reconstruction or restoration of the occluded part before attempting to recognize the face. In the current chapter, the authors discuss various approaches to face recognition, challenges in face recognition of occluded images, and approaches to solve the problem. The authors propose an adaptive system that accepts the localized region of occlusion and recognizes the face adaptively. The chapter demonstrates through case studies that the proposed scheme recognizes the partially occluded faces as accurately as the un-occluded faces and in some cases outperforms the recognition using un-occluded face images.
