A hybrid two-phase algorithm for face recognition

Scientists have developed numerous classifiers in the pattern recognition field, because applying a single classifier is not very conducive to achieve a high recognition rate on face databases. Problems occur when the images of the same person are classified as one class, while they are in fact different in poses, expressions, or lighting conditions. In this paper, we present a hybrid, two-phase face recognition algorithm to achieve high recognition rates on the FBRET data set. The first phase is to compress the large class number database size, whereas the second phase is to perform the decision-making. We investigate a variety of combinations of the feature extraction and pattern classification methods. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are examined and tested using 700 facial images of different poses from FERET database. Experimental results show that the two combinations, LDA+LDA and LDA+SVM, outperform the other types of combinations. Meanwhile, when classifiers are considered in the two-phase face recognition, it is better to adopt the LI distance in the first phase and the class mean in the second phase.