A NOVEL APPROACH FOR FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON FAST LEARNING ALGORITHM AND WAVELET NETWORK THEORY

This paper presents a new approach of face recognition based on wavelet network using 2D fast wavelet transform and multiresolution analysis. This approach is divided in two stages: the training stage and the recognition stage. The first consists to approximate every training face image by a wavelet network. The second consists in recognition of a new test image by comparing it to all the training faces, the distances between this test face and all images from the training set are calculated in order to identify the searched person. The usual training algorithms presents some disadvantages when the weights of the wavelet network are computed by applying the back-propagation algorithm or by direct solution which requires computing an inversion of matrix, this computation may be intensive when the learning data is too large. We present in this paper our solutions to overcome these limitations. We propose a novel learning algorithm based on the 2D Fast Wavelet Transform. Furthermore, we have increased the performances of our algorithm by introducing the Levenberg-Marquardt method to optimize the learning functions and using the Beta wavelet which has at both an analytical expression and wavelet filter bank. Extensive empirical experiments are performed to compare the proposed method with other approaches as PCA, LDA, EBGM and RBF neural network using the ORL and FERET benchmarks.