Discriminant analysis for recognition of human face images

Abstract

In this paper the discriminatory power of various human facial features is studied and a new scheme for Automatic Face Recognition (AFR) is proposed. Using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) of different aspects of human faces in spatial domain, we first evaluate the significance of visual information in different parts/features of the face for identifying the human subject. The LDA of faces also provides us with a small set of features that carry the most relevant information for classification purposes. The features are obtained through eigenvector analysis of scatter matrices with the objective of maximizing between-class and minimizing within-class variations. The result is an efficient projection-based feature extraction and classification scheme for AFR. Soft decisions made based on each of the projections are combined, using probabilistic or evidential approaches to multisource data analysis. For medium-sized databases of human faces, good classification accuracy is achieved using very low-dimensional feature vectors.