Kernel sparse representation with local patterns for face recognition

In this paper we propose a novel kernel sparse representation classification (SRC) framework and utilize the local binary pattern (LBP) descriptor in this framework for robust face recognition. First we develop a kernel coordinate descent (KCD) algorithm for 11 minimization in the kernel space, which is based on the covariance update technique. Then we extract LBP descriptors from each image and apply two types of kernels (χ² distance based and Hamming distance based) with the proposed KCD algorithm under the SRC framework for face recognition. Experiments on both the Extended Yale B and the PIE face databases show that the proposed method is more robust against noise, occlusion, and illumination variations, even with small number of training samples.