Fuzzy Regularized Linear Discriminant Analysis for Face Recognition

A new face recognition method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is based on fuzzy regularized linear discriminant analysis (FR-LDA) and combines the regularized linear discriminant analysis (R-LDA) and the fuzzy set theory. R-LDA is based on a new regularized Fisher's discriminant criterion, which is particularly robust against the small sample size problem compared to the traditional one used in LDA. In the proposed method, we calculate the membership degree matrix by Fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (FKNN) and then incorporate the membership degree into the definition of the between-class and within-class scatter matrices and get the fuzzy between-class and within-class scatter matrices. Experimental results obtained on the FERET database demonstrate that the proposed method improves the classification rate performance.