Face recognition using class specific dictionary learning for sparse representation and collaborative representation

•A novel class specific dictionary learning (CSDL) approach is proposed, where the standard collaborative representation based classification (CRC) or sparse representation based classification (SRC) can be considered as its special cases.•The dual form of dictionary learning is proposed to enhance the interpretability.•Our proposed CSDL achieves superior face recognition performance on several benchmark datasets.

Recently, sparse representation based classification (SRC) and collaborative representation based classification (CRC) have been successfully used for visual recognition and have demonstrated impressive performance. Given a test sample, SRC or CRC formulates its linear representation with respect to the training samples and then computes the residual error for each class. SRC or CRC assumes that the training samples from each class contribute equally to the dictionary in the corresponding class, i.e., the dictionary consists of the training samples in that class. This, however, leads to high residual error and instability. To overcome this limitation, we propose a class specific dictionary learning algorithm. To be specific, by introducing the dual form of dictionary learning, an explicit relationship between the basis vectors and the original image features is represented, which also enhances the interpretability. SRC or CRC can be thus considered as a special case of the proposed algorithm. Blockwise coordinate descent algorithm and Lagrange multipliers are then adopted to optimize the corresponding objective function. Extensive experimental results on five benchmark face recognition datasets show that the proposed algorithm achieves superior performance compared with conventional classification algorithms.