A Subspace Projection Methodology for Nonlinear Manifold Based Face Recognition

A novel feature extraction method that utilizes nonlinear mapping from the original data space to the feature space is presented in this dissertation. Feature extraction methods aim to find compact representations of data that are easy to classify. Measurements with similar values are grouped to same category, while those with differing values are deemed to be of separate categories. For most practical systems, the meaningful features of a pattern class lie in a low dimensional nonlinear constraint region (manifold) within the high dimensional data space. A learning algorithm to model this nonlinear region and to project patterns to this feature space is developed. Least squares estimation approach that utilizes interdependency between points in training patterns is used to form the nonlinear region. The proposed feature extraction strategy is employed to improve face recognition accuracy under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. Though the face features show variations under these conditions, the features of one individual tend to cluster together and can be considered as a neighborhood. Low dimensional representations of face patterns in the feature space may lie in a nonlinear constraint region, which when modeled leads to efficient pattern classification. A feature space encompassing multiple pattern classes can be trained by modeling a separate constraint region for each pattern class and obtaining a mean constraint region by averaging all the individual regions. Unlike most other nonlinear techniques, the proposed method provides an easy intuitive way to place new points onto a nonlinear region in the feature space. The proposed feature extraction and classification method results in improved accuracy when compared to the classical linear representations. Face recognition accuracy is further improved by introducing the concepts of modularity, discriminant analysis and phase congruency into the proposed method. In the modular approach, feature components are extracted from different sub-modules of the images and concatenated to make a single vector to represent a face region. By doing this we are able to extract features that are more representative of the local features of the face. When projected onto an arbitrary line, samples from well formed clusters could produce a confused mixture of samples from all the classes leading to poor recognition. Discriminant analysis aims to find an optimal line orientation for which the data classes are well separated. Experiments performed on various databases to evaluate the performance of the proposed face recognition technique have shown improvement in recognition accuracy, especially under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. This shows that the integration of multiple subspaces, each representing a part of a higher order nonlinear function, could represent a pattern with variability. Research work is progressing to investigate the effectiveness of subspace projection methodology for building manifolds with other nonlinear functions and to identify the optimum nonlinear function from an object classification perspective

Support vector machine for optical diagnosis of cancer

We report the application of a support vector machine (SVM) for the development of diagnostic algorithms for optical diagnosis of cancer. Both linear and nonlinear SVMs have been investigated for this purpose. We develop a methodology that makes use of SVM for both feature extraction and classification jointly by integrating the newly developed recursive feature elimination (RFE) in the framework of SVM. This leads to significantly improved classification results compared to those obtained when an independent feature extractor such as principal component analysis (PCA) is used. The integrated SVM-RFE approach is also found to outperform the classification results yielded by traditional Fisher's linear discriminant (FLD)-based algorithms. All the algorithms are developed using spectral data acquired in a clinical in vivo laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopic study conducted on patients being screened for cancer of the oral cavity and normal volunteers. The best sensitivity and specificity values provided by the nonlinear SVM-RFE algorithm over the data sets investigated are 95 and 96% toward cancer for the training set data based on leave-one-out cross validation and 93 and 97% toward cancer for the independent validation set data. When tested on the spectral data of the uninvolved oral cavity sites from the patients it yielded a specificity of 85%

Dimension Reduction by Mutual Information Discriminant Analysis

In the past few decades, researchers have proposed many discriminant analysis (DA) algorithms for the study of high-dimensional data in a variety of problems. Most DA algorithms for feature extraction are based on transformations that simultaneously maximize the between-class scatter and minimize the withinclass scatter matrices. This paper presents a novel DA algorithm for feature extraction using mutual information (MI). However, it is not always easy to obtain an accurate estimation for high-dimensional MI. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for feature extraction that is based on one-dimensional MI estimations. We will refer to this algorithm as mutual information discriminant analysis (MIDA). The performance of this proposed method was evaluated using UCI databases. The results indicate that MIDA provides robust performance over different data sets with different characteristics and that MIDA always performs better than, or at least comparable to, the best performing algorithms.Comment: 13pages, 3 tables, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Application

Quadratic Projection Based Feature Extraction with Its Application to Biometric Recognition

This paper presents a novel quadratic projection based feature extraction framework, where a set of quadratic matrices is learned to distinguish each class from all other classes. We formulate quadratic matrix learning (QML) as a standard semidefinite programming (SDP) problem. However, the con- ventional interior-point SDP solvers do not scale well to the problem of QML for high-dimensional data. To solve the scalability of QML, we develop an efficient algorithm, termed DualQML, based on the Lagrange duality theory, to extract nonlinear features. To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on biometric recognition. Experimental results on three representative biometric recogni- tion tasks, including face, palmprint, and ear recognition, demonstrate the superiority of the DualQML-based feature extraction algorithm compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithm

A Simple Iterative Algorithm for Parsimonious Binary Kernel Fisher Discrimination

By applying recent results in optimization theory variously known as optimization transfer or majorize/minimize algorithms, an algorithm for binary, kernel, Fisher discriminant analysis is introduced that makes use of a non-smooth penalty on the coefficients to provide a parsimonious solution. The problem is converted into a smooth optimization that can be solved iteratively with no greater overhead than iteratively re-weighted least-squares. The result is simple, easily programmed and is shown to perform, in terms of both accuracy and parsimony, as well as or better than a number of leading machine learning algorithms on two well-studied and substantial benchmarks