Cascaded maximum median-margin discriminant projection with its application to face recognition

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel method called cascaded maximum median-margin discriminant projection (CMMDP) for robust face recognition. Initially, we introduce the maximum median-margin discriminant projection (MMDP) method, which aims to maximize the distances between class medians and their inter-class neighbors, while simultaneously minimizing the distances between class medians and their intra-class samples. To extract features at multiple levels, we extend the MMDP method to its deep version, known as CMMDP. The CMMDP algorithm incorporates the MMDP technique to learn multistage filter banks specifically designed for facial images. Afterward, we utilize straightforward binary hashing techniques for efficient indexing, along with block histograms for effective feature pooling. The CMMDP model is simple and easy to train, while taking full account of the global and local structure of the samples by maximizing the distances between samples that are dissimilar and minimizing the distances between samples that are similar after projection. This results in a low-dimensional data representation with better discriminative performance. We evaluate the performance of CMMDP on face datasets including AR, ORL, ExtYaleB and CMU PIE databases. The results indicate that CMMDP achieves superior performance than most advanced methods.