A priori-driven PCA

Abstract

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a multivariate statistical dimensionality reduction method that has been applied successfully in many pattern recognition problems. In the research area of analysis of faces particularly, PCA has been used not only as a pre-processing step to produce accurate analytical model for automated face recognition systems, but also as a conceptual framework for human face coding. Despite the well-known attractive properties of PCA, the traditional approach does not incorporate high level semantics from human reasoning which may steer its subspace computation. In this paper, we propose a method that allows PCA to incorporate such semantics explicitly. It allows an automatic selective treatment of the variables that compose the patterns of interest, performing data feature extraction and dimensionality reduction whenever some high level information in the form of labeled data are available. The method relies on spatial weights calculated, in this work, by separating hyperplanes. Several experiments using 2D frontal face images and different data sets have been carried out to illustrate the usefulness of the method for dimensionality reduction, interpretation, classification and reconstruction of face images. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.