Enhanced semi-supervised local Fisher discriminant analysis for face recognition

An improved manifold learning method, called enhanced semi-supervised local Fisher discriminant analysis (ESELF), for face recognition is proposed. Motivated by the fact that statistically uncorrelated and parameter-free are two desirable and promising characteristics for dimension reduction, a new difference-based optimization objective function with unlabeled samples has been designed. The proposed method preserves the manifold structure of labeled and unlabeled samples in addition to separating labeled samples in different classes from each other. The semi-supervised method has an analytic form of the globally optimal solution and it can be computed based on eigen decomposition. Experiments on synthetic data and AT&T, Yale and CMU PIE face databases are performed to test and evaluate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Research highlights
► ESELF is a novel semi-supervised manifold learning method.
► ESELF exploits both manifold structure and discriminant information simultaneously.
► ESELF exploits both statistically uncorrelated and parameter-free characteristics.
► ESELF provides a better representation of the face image.