Computational and performance aspects of PCA-based face-recognition algorithms

Algorithms based on principal component analysis (PCA) form the basis of numerous studies in the psychological and algorithmic face-recognition literature. PCA is a statistical technique and its incorporation into a face-recognition algorithm requires numerous design decisions. We explicitly state the design decisions by introducing a generic modular PCA-algorithm. This allows us to investigate these decisions, including those not documented in the literature. We experimented with different implementations of each module, and evaluated the different implementations using the September 1996 FERET evaluation protocol (the de facto standard for evaluating face-recognition algorithms). We experimented with (i) changing the illumination normalization procedure; (ii) studying effects on algorithm performance of compressing images with JPEG and wavelet compression algorithms; (iii) varying the number of eigenvectors in the representation; and (iv) changing the similarity measure in the classification process. We performed two experiments. In the first experiment, we obtained performance results on the standard September 1996 FERET large-gallery image sets. In the second experiment, we examined the variability in algorithm performance on different sets of facial images. The study was performed on 100 randomly generated image sets (galleries) of the same size. Our two most significant results are (i) changing the similarity measure produced the greatest change in performance, and (ii) that difference in performance of ±10% is needed to distinguish between algorithms.