A multi-phase sparse probability framework via entropy minimization for single sample face recognition

In this paper, we propose a robust probability based sparse method to solve single sample face recognition, which harvests the advantages of both local and global representation. Different from previous sparse representation methods that generate sparse coefficients by l1, we produce sparse class probability distribution by proposing a multi-phase sparse probability (MSP) framework. To create class probability distribution, we divide each face image into many local blocks and vote based on the classification results of all blocks. For classifying each block, we propose local similarity assumption that makes many conventional methods feasible to SSPP problem. Moreover, we also propose a heuristic multiphase class selection scheme to solve the entropy minimization problem, which finally provides a higher classification confidence from the global perspective. Experimental results on three popular databases show that our approach not only generalizes well to SSPP problem but also has strong robustness to expression, illumination, occlusion and time variation.