Independent component analysis in a local facial residue space for face recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based face recognition algorithm, which is robust to illumination and pose variation. Generally, it is well known that the first few eigenfaces represent illumination variation rather than identity. Most Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based methods have overcome illumination variation by discarding the projection to a few leading eigenfaces. The space spanned after removing a few leading eigenfaces is called the “residual face space”. We found that ICA in the residual face space provides more efficient encoding in terms of redundancy reduction and robustness to pose variation as well as illumination variation, owing to its ability to represent non-Gaussian statistics. Moreover, a face image is separated into several facial components, local spaces, and each local space is represented by the ICA bases (independent components) of its corresponding residual space. The statistical models of face images in local spaces are relatively simple and facilitate classification by a linear encoding. Various experimental results show that the accuracy of face recognition is significantly improved by the proposed method under large illumination and pose variations.