Supervised within-class-similar discriminative dictionary learning for face recognition

•A discriminative dictionary learning algorithm is put forward for face recognition.•The algorithm combines the linear classification error with the within-class scatter.•The fisher ratios of the coefficients are enhanced.•The proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art dictionary learning algorithms.

The current study puts forward a supervised within-class-similar discriminative dictionary learning (SCDDL) algorithm for face recognition. Some popular discriminative dictionary learning schemes for recognition tasks always incorporate the linear classification error term into the objective function or make some discriminative restrictions on representation coefficients. In the presented SCDDL algorithm, we propose to directly restrict the representation coefficients to be similar within the same class and simultaneously include the linear classification error term in the supervised dictionary learning scheme to derive a more discriminative dictionary for face recognition. The experimental results on three large well-known face databases suggest that our approach can enhance the fisher ratio of representation coefficients when compared with several dictionary learning algorithms that incorporate linear classifiers. In addition, the learned discriminative dictionary, the large fisher ratio of representation coefficients and the simultaneously learned classifier can improve the recognition rate compared with some state-of-the-art dictionary learning algorithms.