Face recognition using an enhanced independent component analysis approach

This paper is concerned with an enhanced independent component analysis (ICA) and its application to face recognition. Typically, face representations obtained by ICA involve unsupervised learning and high-order statistics. In this paper, we develop an enhancement of the generic ICA by augmenting this method by the Fisher linear discriminant analysis (LDA); hence, its abbreviation, FICA.. The FICA is systematically developed and presented along with its underlying architecture. A comparative analysis explores four distance metrics, as well as classification with support vector machines (SVMs). We demonstrate that the FICA approach leads to the formation of well-separated classes in low-dimension subspace and is endowed with a great deal of insensitivity to large variation in illumination and facial expression. The comprehensive experiments are completed for the facial-recognition technology (FERET) face database; a comparative analysis demonstrates that FICA comes with improved classification rates when compared with some other conventional approaches such as eigenface, fisherface, and the ICA itself.