Fractional-order embedding canonical correlation analysis and its applications to multi-view dimensionality reduction and recognition

Due to the noise disturbance and limited number of training samples, within-set and between-set sample covariance matrices in canonical correlation analysis (CCA) usually deviate from the true ones. In this paper, we re-estimate within-set and between-set covariance matrices to reduce the negative effect of this deviation. Specifically, we use the idea of fractional order to respectively correct the eigenvalues and singular values in the corresponding sample covariance matrices, and then construct fractional-order within-set and between-set scatter matrices which can obviously alleviate the problem of the deviation. On this basis, a new approach is proposed to reduce the dimensionality of multi-view data for classification tasks, called fractional-order embedding canonical correlation analysis (FECCA). The proposed method is evaluated on various handwritten numeral, face and object recognition problems. Extensive experimental results on the CENPARMI, UCI, AT&T, AR, and COIL-20 databases show that FECCA is very effective and obviously outperforms the existing joint dimensionality reduction or feature extraction methods in terms of classification accuracy. Moreover, its improvements for recognition rates are statistically significant on most cases below the significance level 0.05.