Compressed sensing with MCT and I(2D)2PCA processing for efficient face recognition

This article describes an effective human face recognition algorithm. Even though the principle component analysis (PCA) is one of the most common feature extraction methods, it is not suitable to implement a real‐time embedded system for face recognition because large amount of computational load and memory capacity are necessary. To overcome this problem, we employ the incremental two‐directional two‐dimensional PCA (I(2D)2PCA) which is a combination of the (2D)2PCA to demand much less computational complexity than the conventional PCA and the incremental PCA (IPCA) to adapt the eigenspace only by using a new incoming sample datum without reusing of all the previous trained data. Furthermore, the modified census transform (MCT), a local normalization method useful for real‐world application and implementation in an embedded system, is adopted to address robustness to illumination variations. To achieve better recognition accuracy with less computational load, the processed features are classified by the compressive sensing approach using ℓ2–minimization. Experimental results on the Yale Face Database B show that the described system using the ℓ2–minimization‐based classification method for input data processed by the I(2D)2PCA and the MCT provided efficient and robust face recognition. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 23, 133–139, 2013