Incremental robust principal component analysis for face recognition using ridge regression

Face recognition efficiency is extremely challenged by image corruption, noise, shadowing and variant face expressions. In this paper, we propose a reliable incremental face recognition algorithm to address this problem. The algorithm is robust to face image misalignment, occlusion, corruption and different style variations. To apply this for large face data streams, the proposed algorithm uses incremental robust principal component analysis (PCA) to regain the intrinsic data of a bunch of images regarding one subject. A novel similarity metric is defined for face recognition and classification. Five different databases and a base of four different criteria are used in the experiments to illustrate the reliability of the proposed method. Experiments point that it outperforms other existing incremental PCA approaches namely incremental singular value decomposition, add block singular value decomposition and candid covariance-free incremental PCA in terms of recognition rate under occlusions, facial expressions and image perspectives. © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.