Color face recognition based on quaternion matrix representation

There are several methods to recognize and reconstruct a human face image. The principal component analysis (PCA) is a successful approach because of its effective extraction of the global feature and excellent reconstruction of face image. However, the crucial shortcomings of PCA are its low recognition rate and overfitting of feature extraction which leads to the dependence of training data on training samples. In this paper, a modified two-dimension principal component analysis (2DPCA) and bidirectional principal component analysis (BDPCA) methods based on quaternion matrix are proposed to recognize and reconstruct a color face image. In these methods, the spatial distribution information of color images is used to represent a color face, and the 2DPCA or BDPCA feature of color face image is extracted by reducing the dimensionality in both column and row directions. A method obtaining orthogonal eigenvector set of quaternion matrix is proposed. Numerous experiments show that the present approach based on quaternion matrix can effectively smooth the overfitting issue and substantially enhance the recognition rate.

Research highlights
► Color face representation model based on quaternion matrix not only takes the R, G, B information of color image as organic body, but also remains a spatial structure of image information.
► 2DPCA and BDPCA in the real number domain are extended to the quaternion domain.
► BDPCA shows good performance on overfitting phenomenon for PCA-based approaches.