Sparse two-dimensional local discriminant projections for feature extraction

Two-dimensional local graph embedding discriminant analysis (2DLGEDA) and two-dimensional discriminant locality preserving projections (2DDLPP) were recently proposed to directly extract features form 2D face matrices to improve the performance of two-dimensional locality preserving projections (2DLPP). But all of them require a high computational cost and the learned transform matrices lack intuitive and semantic interpretations. In this paper, we propose a novel method called sparse two-dimensional locality discriminant projections (S2DLDP), which is a sparse extension of graph-based image feature extraction method. S2DLDP combines the spectral analysis and L-1-norm regression using the Elastic Net to learn the sparse projections. Differing from the existing 2D methods such as 2DLPP, 2DDLP and 2DLGEDA, S2DLDP can learn the sparse 2D face profile subspaces (also called sparsefaces), which give an intuitive, semantic and interpretable feature subspace for face representation. We point out that using S2DLDP for face feature extraction is, in essence, to project the 2D face images on the semantic face profile subspaces, on which face recognition is also performed. Experiments on Yale, ORL and AR face databases show the efficiency and effectiveness of S2DLDP. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.