Vast amounts of video footage are being continuously acquired by surveillance systems on private premises, commercial properties, government compounds, and military installations. Facial recognition systems have the potential to identify suspicious individuals on law enforcement watchlists, but accuracy is severely hampered by the low resolution of typical surveillance footage and the far distance of suspects from the cameras. To improve accuracy, super-resolution can enhance suspect details by utilizing a sequence of low resolution frames from the surveillance footage to reconstruct a higher resolution image for input into the facial recognition system. This work measures the improvement of face recognition with super-resolution in a realistic surveillance scenario. Low resolution and super-resolved query sets are generated using a video database at different eye-to-eye distances corresponding to different distances of subjects from the camera. Performance of a face recognition algorithm using the super-resolved and baseline query sets was calculated by matching against galleries consisting of frontal mug shots. The results show that super-resolution improves performance significantly at the examined mid and close ranges.
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