Face recognition by combining eigenface method with different wavelet subbands

A method combining eigenface with different wavelet subbands for face recognition is proposed. Each training image is decomposed into multi-subbands for extracting their eigenvector sets and projection vectors. In the recognition process, the inner product distance between the projection vectors of the test image and that of the training image are calculated. The training image, corresponding to the maximum distance under the given threshold condition, is considered as the final result. The experimental results on the ORL and YALE face database show that, compared with the eigenface method directly on the image domain or on a single wavelet subband, the recognition accuracy using the proposed method is improved by 5% without influencing the recognition speed.