Enhanced Face Recognition in Crowded Environments with 2D/3D Features and Parallel Hybrid CNN-RNN Architecture with Stacked Auto-Encoder

Abstract

Face recognition (FR) in unconstrained conditions remains an open research topic and an ongoing challenge. The facial images exhibit diverse expressions, occlusions, variations in illumination, and heterogeneous backgrounds. This work aims to produce an accurate and robust system for enhanced Security and Surveillance. A parallel hybrid deep learning model for feature extraction and classification is proposed. An ensemble of three parallel extraction layer models learns the best representative features using CNN and RNN. 2D LBP and 3D Mesh LBP are computed on face images to extract image features as input to two RNNs. A stacked autoencoder (SAE) merged the feature vectors extracted from the three CNN-RNN parallel layers. We tested the designed 2D/3D CNN-RNN framework on four standard datasets. We achieved an accuracy of (Formula presented.). The hybrid deep learning model significantly improves FR against similar state-of-the-art methods. The proposed model was also tested on an unconstrained conditions human crowd dataset, and the results were very promising with an accuracy of (Formula presented.). Furthermore, our model shows an 11.5% improvement over similar hybrid CNN-RNN architectures, proving its robustness in complex environments where the face can undergo different transformations. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.