Analysis of Unsupervised Learning Techniques for Face Recognition

Face recognition has always been a potential research area because of its demand for reliable identification of a human being especially in government and commercial sectors, such as security systems, criminal identification, border control, etc. where a large number of people interact with each other and/or with the system. The last two decades have witnessed many supervised and unsupervised learning techniques proposed by different researchers for the face recognition system. Principal component analysis (PCA), self-organizing map (SOM), and independent component analysis (ICA) are the most widely used unsupervised learning techniques reported by research community. This article presents an analysis and comparison of these techniques. The article also includes two SOM processing methods global SOM (GSOM) and local SOM (LSOM) for performance evaluation along with PCA and ICA. We have used two different databases for our analysis. The simulation result establishes the supremacy of GSOM in general among all the unsupervised techniques. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 20, 261-267, 2010; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/ima.20248