Hybrid SVM/HMM Method for Face Recognition

A face recognition system based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) has been proposed. The powerful discriminative ability of SVM is combined with the temporal modeling ability of HMM. The output of SVM is moderated to be probability output, which replaces the Mixture of Gauss (MOG) in HMM. Wavelet transformation is used to extract observation vector, which reduces the data dimension and improves the robustness. The hybrid system is compared with pure HMM face recognition method based on ORL face database and Yale face database. Experiments results show that the hybrid method has better performance.