Comparative studies of Feature Extraction methods with application to face recognition

In face recognition, the dimensionality of raw data is very high, dimension reduction (feature extraction) should be applied before classification. There exist several feature extraction methods, commonly used are principle component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) techniques. In this paper, we present a comparative study of some feature extraction methods for face recognition in the same conditions. The methods evaluated here include eigenfaces, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA), fisherfaces, direct linear discriminant analysis (D-LDA), regularized linear discriminant analysis (R-LDA), and kernel direct discriminant analysis (KDDA). For the purpose of comparison on feature extraction methods, we adopt nearest neighbor (NN) algorithm from existed classifiers of face recognition, since this classifier is common and simpleness. Empirical studies are conducted to evaluate these feature extraction methods with images from ORL Face Database, and it is found that in most cases LDA-based methods are efficient than PCA-based ones.