Feature Selection in Face Recognition: A Sparse Representation Perspective

In this paper, we examine the role of feature selection in face recognition from the perspective of sparse representation. We cast the recognition problem as finding a sparse representation of the test image features w.r.t. the training set. The sparse representation can be accurately and efficiently computed by `-minimization. The proposed simple algorithm generalizes conventional face recognition classifiers such as nearest neighbors and nearest subspaces. Using face recognition under varying illumination and expression as an example, we show that if sparsity in the recognition problem is properly harnessed, the choice of features is no longer critical. What is critical, however, is whether the number of features is sufficient and whether the sparse representation is correctly found. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the significance of imposing sparsity using the Extended Yale B database and the AR database. Our thorough evaluation shows that, using conventional features such as Eigenfaces and facial parts, the proposed algorithm achieves much higher recognition accuracy on face images with variation in either illumination or expression. Furthermore, other unconventional features such as severely downsampled images and randomly projected features perform almost equally well with the increase of feature dimensions. The differences in performance between different features become insignificant as the feature-space dimension is sufficiently large.