Face recognition using self-organizing map and Principal Component Analysis

Face Recognition has always been a fascinating research area. It has drawn the attention of many researchers because of its various potential applications such as security systems, entertainment, criminal identification etc. Many supervised and unsupervised learning techniques have been reported so far. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a classical and successful method for face recognition. Self Organizing Map (SOM) has also been used for face space representation. This paper makes an attempt to integrate the two techniques for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction and to see the performance when the two are combined. Simulation results show that, though, the individual techniques SOM and PCA itself give excellent performance but the combination of these two can also be utilized for face recognition. The advantage in combining the two techniques is that the reduction in data is higher but at the cost of recognition rate.