Face Recognition Using Kernel Discriminant Analysis

Linear Discrimiant Analysis (LDA) has demonstrated their success in face recognition. But LDA is difficult to handle the high nonlinear problems, such as changes of large viewpoint and illumination in face recognition. In order to overcome these problems, we investigate Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) for face recognition. This approach adopts the kernel functions to replace the dot products of nonlinear mapping in the high dimensional feature space, and then the nonlinear problem can be solved in the input space conveniently without explicit mapping. Two face databases are used to test KDA approach. The results show that our approach outperforms the conventional PCA(Eigenface) and LDA(Fisherface) approaches.