Face Recognition Using Eigenfaces, Geometrical PCA Approximation and Neural Networks

The human face exhibits a high level of complexity when it is regarded as a multidimensional visual model, leading to face recognition systems that require difficult and extensive computations for coding and decoding the face images. A well-established approach in this regard is based on using principle component analysis (PCA) for both feature extraction and face recognition, known as the eigenface approach. This technique, despite a good recognition rate, suffers from the disadvantage of high computation cost due to the complexity of the PCA algorithm. In this paper, we use a geometrical approximated PCA (gaPCA) algorithm for computing the eigenfaces for three different datasets. The face recognition task is performed using a similarity score based on the inverse Euclidean distance for the first two datasets and using a nerual network in the third case. All the results are compared to the case where standard PCA is used. These accuracy results show that gaPCA represents a viable alternative to the classical statistical approach for computing the principal components.