Face recognition using Gabor-based direct linear discriminant analysis and support vector machine

This paper presents a novel and uniform framework for face recognition. This framework is based on a combination of Gabor wavelets, direct linear discriminant analysis (DLDA) and support vector machine (SVM). First, feature vectors are extracted from raw face images using Gabor wavelets. These Gabor-based features are robust against local distortions caused by the variance of illumination, expression and pose. Next, the extracted feature vectors are projected to a low-dimensional subspace using DLDA technique. The Gabor-based DLDA feature vectors are then applied to SVM classifier. A new kernel function for SVM called hyperhemispherically normalized polynomial (HNP) is also proposed in this paper and its validity on the improvement of classification accuracy is theoretically proved and experimentally tested for face recognition. The proposed algorithm was evaluated using the FERET database. Experimental results show that the proposed face recognition system outperforms other related approaches in terms of recognition rate.

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► A novel face recognition algorithm is proposed in this paper.
► The proposed method is based on a fusion of Gabor wavelets, DLDA, and SVM.
► A new kernel called HNP is also designed for our SVM-based face recognition system.
► Various experiments verify superior performance of the proposed scheme.