Feature extraction using discrete cosine transform and discrimination power analysis with a face recognition technology

Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is a powerful transform to extract proper features for face recognition. After applying DCT to the entire face images, some of the coefficients are selected to construct feature vectors. Most of the conventional approaches select coefficients in a zigzag manner or by zonal masking. In some cases, the low-frequency coefficients are discarded in order to compensate illumination variations. Since the discrimination power of all the coefficients is not the same and some of them are discriminant than others, so we can achieve a higher true recognition rate by using discriminant coefficients (DCs) as feature vectors. Discrimination power analysis (DPA) is a statistical analysis based on the DCT coefficients properties and discrimination concept. It searches for the coefficients which have more power to discriminate different classes better than others. The proposed approach, against the conventional approaches, is data-dependent and is able to find DCs on each database. The simulations results of the various coefficient selection (CS) approaches on ORL and Yale databases confirm the success of the proposed approach. The DPA-based approaches achieve the performance of PCA/LDA or better with less complexity. The proposed method can be implemented for any feature selection problem as well as DCT coefficients. Also, a new modification of PCA and LDA is proposed namely, DPA-PCA and DPA-LDA. In these modifications DCs which are selected by DPA are used as the input of these transforms. Simulation results of DPA-PCA and DPA-LDA on the ORL and Yale database verify the improvement of the results by using these new modifications. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.