Generalized Low Dimensional Feature Subspace for Robust Face Recognition on Unseen datasets using Kernel Correlation Feature Analysis

In this paper we analyze and demonstrate the subspace generalization power of the kernel correlation feature analysis (KCFA) method for producing compact low dimensional subspace that has good representation ability to work on unseen, untrained datasets. Examining the portability of an algorithm across different datasets is an important practical aspect of face recognition applications where the technology cannot be dataset-dependant in real-world practical applications. In most face recognition literature, algorithms are demonstrated on datasets by training on some part of the dataset and testing on the remainder. In general, the training and testing data have the same people but different capture sessions so essentially, some of the expected variation and people are modeled in the training set. In this paper we describe how we efficiently build a compact feature space using kernel correlation filter analysis on the generic training set of the FRGC dataset, and test the built subspace on other well-known face datasets. We show that the feature subspace produced by KCFA has good representation and discrimination to unseen datasets and produces good verification and identification rates compared to other subspace methods such as PCA. Its efficiency, lower dimensionality (the KCFA is only a 222 dimensional subspace) and discriminative power make it more practical and powerful than PCA as a powerful lower dimensionality reduction method for modeling faces and facial variations.