Supervised Discriminant Projection with Its Application to Face Recognition

In the past few decades, many face recognition methods have been developed. Among these methods, subspace analysis is an effective approach for face recognition. Unsupervised discriminant projection (UDP) finds an embedding subspace that preserves local structure information, and uncovers and separates embedding corresponding to different manifolds. Though UDP has been applied in many fields, it has limits to solve the classification tasks, such as the ignorance of the class information. Thus, a novel subspace method, called supervised discriminant projection (SDP), is proposed for face recognition in this paper. In our method, the class information was utilized in the procedure of feature extraction. In SDP, the local structure of the original data is constructed according to a certain kind of similarity between data points, which takes special consideration of both the local information and class information. We test the performance of the proposed method SDP on three popular face image databases (i.e. AR database, Yale database, and a subset of FERET database). Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective.