Face recognition using PCA and SVM

Automatic recognition of people has received much attention during the recent years due to its many applications in different fields such as law enforcement, security applications or video indexing. Face recognition is an important and very challenging technique to automatic people recognition. Up to date, there is no technique that provides a robust solution to all situations and different applications that face recognition may encounter. In general, we can make sure that performance of a face recognition system is determined by how to extract feature vector exactly and to classify them into a group accurately. It, therefore, is necessary for us to closely look at the feature extractor and classifier. In this paper, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is used to play a key role in feature extractor and the SVMs are used to tackle the face recognition problem. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been recently proposed as a new classifier for pattern recognition. We illustrate the potential of SVMs on the Cambridge ORL Face database, which consists of 400 images of 40 individuals, containing quite a high degree of variability in expression, pose, and facial details. The SVMs that have been used included the Linear (LSVM), Polynomial (PSVM), and Radial Basis Function (RBFSVM) SVMs. We provide experimental evidence which show that Polynomial and Radial Basis Function (RBF) SVMs performs better than Linear SVM on the ORL Face Dataset when both are used with one against all classification. We also compared the SVMs based recognition with the standard eigenface approach using the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Classification criterion.