Simultaneous and orthogonal decomposition of data using Multimodal Discriminant Analysis

We present Multimodal Discriminant Analysis (MMDA), a novel method for decomposing variations in a dataset into independent factors (modes). For face images, MMDA effectively separates personal identity, illumination and pose into orthogonal subspaces. MMDA is based on maximizing the Fisher Criterion on all modes at the same time, and is therefore well-suited for multimodal and mode-invariant pattern recognition. We also show that MMDA may be used for dimension reduction, and for synthesizing images under novel illumination and even novel personal identity.