Singular values (SVs) feature vectors of face image have been used for face recognition as the feature recently. Although SVs have some important properties of algebraic and geometric invariance and insensitiveness to noise, they are the representation of face image in its own eigen-space spanned by the two orthogonal matrices of singular value decomposition (SVD) and clearly contain little useful information for face recognition. This study concentrates on extracting more informational feature from a frontal and upright view image based on SVD and proposing an improving method for face recognition. After standardized by intensity normalization, all training and testing face images are projected onto a uniform eigen-space that is obtained from SVD of standard face image. To achieve more computational efficiency, the dimension of the uniform eigen-space is reduced by discarding the eigenvectors that the corresponding eigenvalue is close to zero. Euclidean distance classifier is adopted in recognition. Two standard databases from Yale University and Olivetti research laboratory are selected to evaluate the recognition accuracy of the proposed method. These databases include face images with different expressions, small occlusion, different illumination condition and different poses. Experimental results on the two face databases show the effectiveness of the method and its insensitivity to the face expression, illumination and posture.

Date Published: 25 August 2004
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5404, Biometric Technology for Human Identification, (25 August 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.541775

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5404:
Biometric Technology for Human Identification
Anil K. Jain; Nalini K. Ratha, Editor(s)