A novel sparse representation method based on virtual samples for face recognition

Though sparse representation (Wagner et al. in IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 34(2):372–386, 2012, CVPR 597–604, 2009) can perform very well in face recognition (FR), it still can be improved. To improve the performance of FR, a novel sparse representation method based on virtual samples is proposed in this paper. The proposed method first extends the training samples to form a new training set by adding random noise to them and then performs FR. As the testing samples can be represented better with the new training set, the ultimate classification obtained using the proposed method is more accurate than the classification based on the original training samples. A number of FR experiments show that the classification accuracy obtained using our method is usually 2–5 % greater than that obtained using the method mentioned in Xu and Zhu (Neural Comput Appl, 2012).