Symbolic factorial discriminant analysis for illumination invariant face recognition

Abstract

In this paper, a new appearance-based technique called symbolic factorial discriminant analysis (symbolic FDA) is explored for face representation and recognition under varying illumination conditions. In the past few years, many appearance-based methods have been proposed to model image variations of human faces under different lighting conditions using single valued variables to represent the facial features. In the proposed symbolic factorial discriminant analysis method, we extract interval type discriminating features, which are robust to illumination changes. The minimum distance classifier with symbolic dissimilarity measure is used for classification. The proposed method has been successfully tested for face recognition using three databases, namely, Yale Face database B, CMU PIE database and Harvard database. The experimental results have demonstrated the effective performance of this method. © 2008 World Scientific Publishing Company.