Manifold Regularized Local Sparse Representation for Face Recognition

Sparse representation-(or sparse coding)-based classification has been successfully applied to face recognition. However, it can become problematic in the presence of illumination variations or occlusions. In this paper, we propose a Manifold Regularized Local Sparse Representation (MRLSR) model to address such difficulties. The key idea behind the MRLSR method is that all coding vectors in sparse representation should be group sparse, which means holding the two properties of both individual sparsity and local similarity. As a consequence, the face recognition rate can be considerably improved. The MRLSR model is optimized by the modified homotopy algorithm, which keeps stable under different choices of the weighting parameter. Extensive experiments are performed on various face databases, which contain illumination variations and occlusions. We show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and provides the highest recognition rate.