An efficient approach for face recognition based on common eigenvalues

• A new Approach is proposed for face recognition.
• The proposed approach is based on the algorithm on common eigenvalues.
• The companion matrix is used for image features representation.
• The nullity of calculated symmetric matrix is used as measure for classification.
• It gives better performance such as recognition rate and computational time.

In this paper, a simple technique is proposed for face recognition among many human faces. It is based on the polynomial coefficients, covariance matrix and algorithm on common eigenvalues. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that the identification of similarity between human faces is carried out without computing actual eigenvalues and eigenvectors. A symmetric matrix is calculated using the polynomial coefficients-based companion matrices of two compared images. The nullity of a calculated symmetric matrix is used as similarity measure for face recognition. The value of nullity is very small for dissimilar images and distinctly large for similar face images. The feasibility of the propose approach is demonstrated on three face databases, i.e., the ORL database, the Yale database B and the FERET database. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed approach for feature extraction and classification of the face images having large variation in pose and illumination.