Feature selection for face recognition: a memetic algorithmic approach

The eigenface method that uses principal component analysis (PCA) has been the standard and popular method used in face recognition. This paper presents a PCA - memetic algorithm (PCA-MA) approach for feature selection. PCA has been extended by MAs where the former was used for feature extraction/dimensionality reduction and the latter exploited for feature selection. Simulations were performed over ORL and YaleB face databases using Euclidean norm as the classifier. It was found that as far as the recognition rate is concerned, PCA-MA completely outperforms the eigenface method. We compared the performance of PCA extended with genetic algorithm (PCA-GA) with our proposed PCA-MA method. The results also clearly established the supremacy of the PCA-MA method over the PCA-GA method. We further extended linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) approaches with the MA and observed significant improvement in recognition rate with fewer features. This paper also compares the performance of PCA-MA, LDA-MA and KPCA-MA approaches.