Using Support Vector Machines to Enhance the Performance of Bayesian Face Recognition

In this paper, we first develop a direct Bayesian-based support vector machine (SVM) by combining the Bayesian analysis with the SVM. Unlike traditional SVM-based face recognition methods that require one to train a large number of SVMs, the direct Bayesian SVM needs only one SVM trained to classify the face difference between intrapersonal variation and extrapersonal variation. However, the additional simplicity means that the method has to separate two complex subspaces by one hyperplane thus affecting the recognition accuracy. In order to improve the recognition performance, we develop three more Bayesian-based SVMs, including the one-versus-all method, the hierarchical agglomerative clustering-based method, and the adaptive clustering method. Finally, we combine the adaptive clustering method with multilevel subspace analysis to further improve the recognition performance. We show the improvement of the new algorithms over traditional subspace methods through experiments on two face databases - the FERET database and the XM2VTS database