Slow Feature Discriminant Analysis and its application on handwritten digit recognition

Slow feature analysis (SFA) is an unsupervised algorithm by extracting the slowly varying features from time series and has been used to pattern recognition successfully. Based on SFA, this paper develops a new algorithm, Slow feature discriminant analysis (SFDA), which can maximize the temporal variation of between-class time series, and minimize the temporal variation of within-class time series simultaneously. Due to adoption of discrimination power, the performance on pattern recognition is improved compared to SFA. The experiments results on MNIST digit handwritten database also show that the proposed algorithm is in particular attractive.