Structural two-dimensional principal component analysis for image recognition

In this paper, a new technique called structural two-dimensional principal component analysis (S2DPCA) is proposed for image recognition. S2DPCA is a subspace learning method that identifies the structural information for discrimination. Different from conventional two-dimensional principal component analysis (2DPCA) that only reflects within-row information of images, the goal of S2DPCA is to discover structural discriminative information contained in both within-row and between-row of the images. By contrast with 2DPCA, S2DPCA is directly based on the augmented images encoding corresponding row membership, and the projection directions of S2DPCA are obtained by solving an eigenvalue problem of the augmented image covariance matrix. Computationally, S2DPCA is straightforward and comparative with 2DPCA. Like 2DPCA, the singularity problem is completely avoided in S2DPCA. Experiments on face recognition and handwritten digit recognition are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.