Grassmann Registration Manifolds for Face Recognition

Motivated by image perturbation and the geometry of manifolds, we present a novel method combining these two elements. First, we form a tangent space from a set of perturbed images and observe that the tangent space admits a vector space structure. Second, we embed the approximated tangent spaces on a Grassmann manifold and employ a chordal distance as the means for comparing subspaces. The matching process is accelerated using a coarse to fine strategy. Experiments on the FERET database suggest that the proposed method yields excellent results using both holistic and local features. Specifically, on the FERET Dup2 data set, our proposed method achieves 83.8% rank 1 recognition: to our knowledge the currently the best result among all non-trained methods. Evidence is also presented that peak recognition performance is achieved using roughly 100 distinct perturbed images.