Performance evaluation of subspace methods to tackle small sample size problem in face recognition

Abstract

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) has been one of the popular subspace methods for face recognition. But this method suffers from the small sample size (SSS) problem, also known as 'curse of dimensionality'. Various techniques have been proposed in literature to overcome this limitation. But it is still unclear which method provides the best solution to SSS problem. In this paper, we have investigated the performance of some popular subspace methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), PCA + LDA, LDA via QR decomposition, Null-space LDA, Exponential Discriminant Analysis (EDA), PCA+EDA etc. Extensive experiments have been performed on five publically available face datasets viz. AR, CMU-PIE, PIX, Yale and YaleB. The performance is measured in terms of average classification accuracy. Experimental results show that the performance increases with the increase in the number of images per person in training set irrespective of the datasets. There is no clear winner among the subspace methods under investigation. But, the performance of PCA+LDA and PCA+EDA is consistent in tackling SSS problem irrespective of the dataset and can also handle the illumination variation in face recognition.