The dimension reduction of large scale high-dimensional data is a challenging task, especially the dimension reduction of face data and the accuracy increment of face recognition in the large scale face recognition system, which may cause large storage space and long recognition time. In order to further reduce the recognition time and the storage space in the large scale face recognition systems, on the basis of the general non-negative matrix factorization based on left semi-tensor (GNMFL) without dimension matching constraints proposed in our previous work, we propose a sparse GNMFL/L (SGNMFL/L) to decompose a large number of face data sets in the large scale face recognition systems, which makes the decomposed base matrix sparser and suppresses the decomposed coefficient matrix. Therefore, the dimension of the basis matrix and the coefficient matrix can be further reduced. Two sets of experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed SGNMFL/L on two databases. The experiments are mainly designed to verify the effects of two hyper-parameters on the sparseness of basis matrix factorized by SGNMFL/L, compare the performance of the conventional NMF, sparse NMF (SNMF), GNMFL, and the proposed SGNMFL/L in terms of storage space and time efficiency, and compare their face recognition accuracies with different noises. Both the theoretical derivation and the experimental results show that the proposed SGNMF/L can effectively save the storage space and reduce the computation time while achieving high recognition accuracy and has strong robustness
