Regularized discriminant analysis for the small sample size problem in face recognition

It is well-known that the applicability of both linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) to high-dimensional pattern classification tasks such as face recognition (FR) often suffers from the so-called “small sample size” (SSS) problem arising from the small number of available training samples compared to the dimensionality of the sample space. In this paper, we propose a new QDA like method that effectively addresses the SSS problem using a regularization technique. Extensive experimentation performed on the FERET database indicates that the proposed methodology outperforms traditional methods such as Eigenfaces, direct QDA and direct LDA in a number of SSS setting scenarios.