PCA and LDA based Neural Networks for Human Face Recognition

After 9/11 tragedy, governments in all over the world started to look more seriously to the levels of security they have at their airports and borders. Countries annual budgets were increased drastically to have the most recent technologies in identification, recognition and tracking of suspects. The demand growth on these applications helped researchers to be able to fund their research projects. One of most common biometric recognition techniques is face recognition. Although face recognition is not as accurate as the other recognition methods such as fingerprints, it still grabs huge attention of many researchers in the field of computer vision. The main reason behind this attention is the fact that the face is the conventional way people use to identify each others. Over the last few decades, a lot of researchers gave up working in the face recognition problem due to the inefficiencies of the methods used to represent faces. The face representation was performed by using two categories. The First category is global approach or appearance-based, which uses holistic texture features and is applied to the face or specific region of it. The second category is feature-based or component-based, which uses the geometric relationship among the facial features like mouth, nose, and eyes. (Wiskott et al., 1997) implemented feature-based approach by a geometrical model of a face by 2-D elastic graph. Another example of feature-based was done by independently matching templates of three facial regions (eyes, mouth and nose) and the configuration of the features was unconstrained since the system didn’t include geometrical model (Brunelli & Poggio, 1993). Principal components analysis (PCA) method (Sirovich & Kirby, 1987; Kirby & Sirovich, 1990) which is also called eigenfaces (Turk & Pentland, 1991; Pentland & Moghaddam, 1994) is appearance-based technique used widely for the dimensionality reduction and recorded a great performance in face recognition. PCA based approaches typically include two phases: training and classification. In the training phase, an eigenspace is established from the training samples using PCA and the training face images are mapped to the eigenspace for classification. In the classification phase, an input face is projected to the same eigenspace and classified by an appropriate classifier. Contrasting the PCA which encodes information in an orthogonal linear space, the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method (Belhumeur et al., 1997; Zhao et al., 1998) which also known as fisherfaces method is another example of appearance-based techniques which encodes discriminatory information in a linear separable space of which bases are not necessarily orthogonal.