Euler sparse representation for image classification

Abstract

Sparse representation based classification (SRC) has gained great success in image recognition. Motivated by the fact that kernel trick can capture the nonlinear similarity of features, which may help improve the separability and margin between nearby data points, we propose Euler SRC for image classification, which is essentially the SRC with Euler sparse representation. To be specific, it first maps the images into the complex space by Euler representation, which has a negligible effect for outliers and illumination, and then performs complex SRC with Euler representation. The major advantage of our method is that Euler representation is explicit with no increase of the image space dimensionality, thereby enabling this technique to be easily deployed in real applications. To solve Euler SRC, we present an efficient algorithm, which is fast and has good convergence. Extensive experimental results illustrate that Euler SRC outperforms traditional SRC and achieves better performance for image classification.