Enhanced Fisherfaces for Robust Face Recognition

This research features a new method for automatic face recognition robust to variations in lighting, facial expression and eyewear. The new algorithm named SKKUfaces (Sungkyunkwan University faces) employs PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and FLD (Fisher’s Linear Discriminant) in series similarly to Fisherfaces. The fundamental difference is that SKKUfaces effectively eliminates, in the reduced PCA subspace, portions of the subspace that are responsible for variations in lighting and facial expression and then applies FLD to the resulting subspace. This results in superb discriminating power for pattern classification and excellent recognition accuracy. We also propose an efficient method to compute the between-class scatter and within-class scatter matrices for the FLD analysis. We have evaluated the performance of SKKUfaces using YALE and SKKU facial databases. Experimental results show that the SKKUface method is computationally efficient and achieves much better recognition accuracy than the Fisherface method [1] especially for facial images with variations in lighting and eyewear.