Virtual images inspired consolidate collaborative representation-based classification method for face recognition

The collaborative representation-based classification method performs well in the field of classification of high-dimensional images such as face recognition. It utilizes training samples from all classes to represent a test sample and assigns a class label to the test sample using the representation residuals. However, this method still suffers from the problem that limited number of training sample influences the classification accuracy when applied to image classification. In this paper, we propose a modified collaborative representation-based classification method (MCRC), which exploits novel virtual images and can obtain high classification accuracy. The procedure to produce virtual images is very simple but the use of them can bring surprising performance improvement. The virtual images can sufficiently denote the features of original face images in some case. Extensive experimental results doubtlessly demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the classification accuracy. This is mainly attributed to the integration of the collaborative representation and the proposed feature-information dominated virtual images.