Recognition of Faces Using Improved Principal Component Analysis

Face recognition has been an important issue in computer vision and pattern recognition over the last several decades. While a human can recognize faces easily, automated face recognition remains a great challenge in computer-based automated recognition research. One difficulty in face recognition is how to handle the variations in expression, pose, and illumination when only a limited number of training samples are available. In this paper, an Improved Principal Component Analysis (IPCA) is proposed for face recognition. Initially the eigenspace is created with eigenvalues and eigenvectors. From this space, the eigenfaces are constructed, and the most relevant eigenfaces have been selected using IPCA. With these eigenfaces, the input images are be classified based on Euclidian distance. The proposed method was tested on ORL face database. Experimental results on this database demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for face recognition with less misclassification in comparison with previous methods.