Face recognition based on face-specific subspace

In this article, we present an individual appearance model based method, named face-specific subspace (FSS), for recognizing human faces under variation in lighting, expression, and viewpoint. This method derives from the traditional Eigenface but differs from it in essence. In Eigenface, each face image is represented as a point in a low-dimensional face subspace shared by all faces; however, the experiments conducted show one of the demerits of such a strategy: it fails to accurately represent the most discriminanting features of a specific face. Therefore, we propose to model each face with one individual face subspace, named Face-Specific Subspace. Distance from the face-specific subspace, that is, the reconstruction error, is then exploited as the similarity measurement for identification. Furthermore, to enable the proposed approach to solve the single example problem, a technique to derive multisamples from one single example is further developed. Extensive experiments on several academic databases show that our method significantly outperforms Eigenface and template matching, which intensively indicates its robustness under variation in illumination, expression, and viewpoint. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.