Discriminant Subspace Analysis for Face Recognition with Small Number of Training Samples

In this paper, a framework of Discriminant Subspace Analysis (DSA) method is proposed to deal with the Small Sample Size (SSS) problem in face recognition area. Firstly, it is rigorously proven that the null space of the total covariance matrix, St, is useless for recognition. Therefore, a framework of Fisher discriminant analysis in a low-dimensional space is developed by projecting all the samples onto the range space of St . Two algorithms are proposed in this framework, i.e., Unified Linear Discriminant Analysis (ULDA) and Modified Linear Discriminant Analysis (MLDA). ULDA extracts discriminant information from three subspaces of this low-dimensional space. MLDA adopts a modified Fisher criterion which can avoid the singularity problem in conventional LDA. Experimental results on a large combined database have demonstrated that the proposed ULDA and MLDA can both achieve better performance than the other state-of-the-art subspace based methods in recognition accuracy.