Discriminant embedding by sparse representation and nonparametric discriminant analysis for face recognition

A novel supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm, named discriminant embedding by sparse representation and nonparametric discriminant analysis (DESN), was proposed for face recognition. Within the framework of DESN, the sparse local scatter and multi-class nonparametric between-class scatter were exploited for within-class compactness and between-class separability description, respectively. These descriptions, inspired by sparse representation theory and nonparametric technique, are more discriminative in dealing with complex-distributed data. Furthermore, DESN seeks for the optimal projection matrix by simultaneously maximizing the nonparametric between-class scatter and minimizing the sparse local scatter. The use of Fisher discriminant analysis further boosts the discriminating power of DESN. The proposed DESN was applied to data visualization and face recognition tasks, and was tested extensively on the Wine, ORL, Yale and Extended Yale B databases. Experimental results show that DESN is helpful to visualize the structure of high-dimensional data sets, and the average face recognition rate of DESN is about 9.4%, higher than that of other algorithms.