UNCORRELATED LOCAL FISHER DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS FOR FACE RECOGNITION

An improved manifold learning method, called Uncorrelated Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis (ULFDA), for face recognition is proposed. Motivated by the fact that statistically uncorrelated features are desirable for dimension reduction, we propose a new difference-based optimization objective function to seek a feature submanifold such that the within-manifold scatter is minimized, and between-manifold scatter is maximized simultaneously in the embedding space. We impose an appropriate constraint to make the extracted features statistically uncorrelated. The uncorrelated discriminant method has an analytic global optimal solution, and it can be computed based on eigen decomposition. As a result, the proposed algorithm not only derives the optimal and lossless discriminative information, but also guarantees that all extracted features are statistically uncorrelated. Experiments on synthetic data and AT&T, extended YaleB and CMU PIE face databases are performed to test and evaluate the proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.