Face recognition using discriminant eigenvectors

The discriminatory power of different segments of a human face is studied end a new scheme for face recognition is proposed. We first focus on the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) of human faces in spatial and wavelet domains, which enables us to objectively evaluate the significant of visual information in different parts of the face for identifying the person. The results of this study can be compared with subjective psychovisual findings. The LDA of faces also provides us with a small set of features that carry the most relevant information for face recognition. The features are obtained through the eigenvector analysis of scatter matrices with the objective of maximizing between class variations and minimizing within class variations. The result is an efficient projection based feature extraction and classification scheme for recognition of human faces. For a midsize database of faces excellent classification accuracy is achieved with only four features.