Modular Fisher Discriminant Sparse Representation for robust face recognition

This paper proposes a novel framework for robust face recognition based on sparse representation and discrimination ranking. This method consists of three stages. The first stage partitions each training sample into some overlapped modules and then computes each module's Fisher ratio, respectively. The second stage selects modules which have higher Fisher ratios to comprise a template to filter training and test images. The dictionary is constructed by the filtered training images. The third stage computes the sparse representation of filtered test sample on the dictionary to perform identification. The advantages of the proposed method are listed as follows: the first stage can preserve the local structure. The second stage removes the modules that have little contribution for classification. Then the method uses the retaining modules to classify the test sample by SRC which makes the method robust. Compared with the related methods, experimental results on benchmark face databases verify the advancement of the proposed method. The proposed method not only has a high accuracy but also can be clearly interpreted.