Single-Sample Face Recognition Based on LPP Feature Transfer

Due to its wide applications in practice, face recognition has been an active research topic. With the availability of adequate training samples, many machine learning methods could yield high face recognition accuracy. However, under the circumstance of inadequate training samples, especially the extreme case of having only a single training sample, face recognition becomes challenging. How to deal with conflicting concerns of the small sample size and high dimensionality in one-sample face recognition is critical for its achievable recognition accuracy and feasibility in practice. Being different from the conventional methods for global face recognition based on generalization ability promotion and local face recognition depending on image segmentation, a single-sample face recognition algorithm based on locality preserving projection (LPP) feature transfer is proposed here. First, transfer sources are screened to obtain the selective sample source using the whitened cosine similarity metric. Second, we project the vectors of source faces and target faces into feature subspace by LPP, respectively, and calculate the feature transfer matrix to approximate the mapping relationship on source faces and target faces in subspace. Then, the feature transfer matrix is used on training samples to transfer the original macro characteristics to target macro characteristics. Finally, the nearest neighbor classifier is used for face recognition. Our results based on popular databases FERET, ORL, and Yale demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LPP feature transfer-based one-sample face recognition algorithm when compared with popular single-sample face recognition algorithms, such as (PC)²A and Block FLDA.