Improving representation-based classification for robust face recognition

The sparse representation classification (SRC) method proposed by Wright et al. is considered as the breakthrough of face recognition because of its good performance. Nevertheless it still cannot perfectly address the face recognition problem. The main reason for this is that variation of poses, facial expressions, and illuminations of the facial image can be rather severe and the number of available facial images are fewer than the dimensions of the facial image, so a certain linear combination of all the training samples is not able to fully represent the test sample. In this study, we proposed a novel framework to improve the representation-based classification (RBC). The framework first ran the sparse representation algorithm and determined the unavoidable deviation between the test sample and optimal linear combination of all the training samples in order to represent it. It then exploited the deviation and all the training samples to resolve the linear combination coefficients. Finally, the classification rule, the training samples, and the renewed linear combination coefficients were used to classify the test sample. Generally, the proposed framework can work for most RBC methods. From the viewpoint of regression analysis, the proposed framework has a solid theoretical soundness. Because it can, to an extent, identify the bias effect of the RBC method, it enables RBC to obtain more robust face recognition results. The experimental results on a variety of face databases demonstrated that the proposed framework can improve the collaborative representation classification, SRC, and improve the nearest neighbor classifier.