An improved discriminative common vectors and support vector machine based face recognition approach

An improved discriminative common vectors and support vector machine based face recognition approach is proposed in this paper. The discriminative common vectors (DCV) algorithm is a recently addressed discriminant method, which shows better face recognition effects than some commonly used linear discriminant algorithms. The DCV is based on a variation of Fisher's Linear Discriminant Analysis for the small sample size case. However, for multiclass problem, the Fisher criterion is clearly suboptimal. We design an improved discriminative common vector by adjustment for the Fisher criterion that can estimate the within-class and between-class scatter matrices more accurately for classification purposes. Then we employ support vector machine as the classifier due to its higher classification and higher generalization. Testing on two public large face database: ORL and AR database, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is an effective face recognition approach, which outperforms several representative recognition methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.