Local sparse representation projections for face recognition

How to define the sparse affinity weight matrices is still an open problem in existing manifold learning algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning method called local sparse representation projections (LSRP) for linear dimensionality reduction. Differing from sparsity preserving projections (SPP) and the recent manifold learning methods such as locality preserving projections (LPP), LSRP introduces the local sparse representation information into the objective function. Although there are no labels used in the local sparse representation, it still can provide better measure coefficients and significant discriminant abilities. By combining the local interclass neighborhood relationships and sparse representation information, LSRP aims to preserve the local sparse reconstructive relationships of the data and simultaneously maximize the interclass separability. Comprehensive comparison and extensive experiments show that LSRP achieves higher recognition rates than principle component analysis, linear discriminant analysis and the state-of-the-art techniques such as LPP, SPP and maximum variance projections.