Unified Principal Component Analysis with generalized Covariance Matrix for face recognition

Recently, 2DPCA and its variants have attracted much attention in face recognition area. In this paper, some efforts are made to discover the underlying fundaments of these methods, and a novel framework called unified principal component analysis (UPCA) is proposed. First, we introduce a novel concept, named generalized covariance matrix (GCM), which is naturally derived from the traditional covariance matrix (CM). Each element of GCM is a generalized covariance of two random vectors rather than two scalar variables in CM. Based on GCM, the UPCA framework is proposed, from which the traditional PCA and its 2D counterparts can be deduced as special cases. Furthermore, under the UPCA framework, we not only revisit the existing 2D PCA methods and their limitations, but also propose two new methods: the grid-sampling method (GridPCA) and the intra-group correlation reduction method. Extensive experimental results on the FERET face database support the theoretical analysis and validate the feasibility of the proposed methods.