Intrapersonal subspace analysis with application to adaptive Bayesian face recognition

We propose a subspace distance measure to analyze the similarity between intrapersonal face subspaces, which characterize the variations between face images of the same individual. We call the conventional intrapersonal subspace the average intrapersonal subspace (AIS) because the image differences often come from a large number of persons. We call an intrapersonal subspace specific intrapersonal subspace (SIS) if the image differences are from just one person. We demonstrate that SIS varies from person to person and most SISs are not similar to AIS. Based on these observations, we introduce the maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptation to the problem of SIS estimation, and apply it to the Bayesian face recognition algorithm. Experimental results show that the adaptive Bayesian algorithm outperforms the non-adaptive Bayesian algorithm as well as Eigenface and Fisherface methods when a small number of adaptation images are available.