Hierarchical linear combinations for face recognition

A hierarchical representation consisting of two level linear combinations (LC) is proposed for face recognition. At the first level, a face image is represented as a linear combination (LC) of a set of basis vectors, i.e. eigenfaces. Thereby a face image corresponds to a feature vector (prototype) in the eigenface space. Normally several such prototypes are available for a face class, each representing the face under a particular condition such as in viewpoint, illumination, and so on. We propose to use the second level LC, that of the prototypes belonging to the same face class, to treat the prototypes coherently. The purpose is to improve face recognition under a new condition not captured by the prototypes by using a linear combination of them. A new distance measure called nearest LC (NLC) is proposed as opposed to the NN. Experiments show that our method yields significantly better results than the one level eigenface methods.