Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control
and Automation, June 21 - 23, 2006, Dalian, China
Face Recognition Based on Independent Component
Analysis and Fuzzy Support Vector Machine
Yongguo Liu and Gang Chen
Institute of Hydro-Electric Engineering
Xi’an University of Technology
Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China
T T
liuyg@xaut.edu.cn
Abstract - This paper presents a new approach to face
recognition using independent component analysis (ICA) and
fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM). Firstly, 2D wavelet
transform is adopted to obtain different level of wavelet
coefficients. Secondly ICA is applied on the low-frequency which
contains most discrimination information of the original face
image. One criterion that not all ICs are useful for face
recognition is demonstrated and a rule for selecting ICs is
proposed. For reducing the computational cost, a fast ICA
method is proposed. Then, FSVM classifier is designed for
recognition. Lastly, this algorithm is tested on the ORL and Yale
face databases and the experimental result is encouraging, which
achieves comparatively high recognition accuracy and is more
computationally efficient than using general PCA ˉ based
recognition method.
Index Terms – Face recognition, independent component
analysis (ICA), fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM), wavelet
transform, feature extraction.
I. INTRODUCTION
Face recognition by computer has been started since
1970s and currently becomes an active and important research
topic in the domain of image processing and pattern
recognition in the past few years because of its wide potential
applications such as biometrics systems, security control,
personal identification and human-computer communication
etc. Up till now, many kinds of face recognition methods have
been proposed by earlier researchers and among these
methods, they can be mainly divided into two classes,
constituent-based and face-based [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]and[6].
In the constituent-based approaches, recognition is based on
the relation between human facial features such as eyes,
mouth, noise, face silhouettes and boundaries. Face–based
approaches attempt to capture and define the face as a whole.
In this kind of method, face is treated as a two-dimension or
three-dimension matrix and is matched through finding its
statistical regularities. One of the most typical and general
approaches is principle component analysis (PCA) or
eigenface. Along this direction many PCA-based face
recognition systems have been developed. PCA method can
perform well in scaled and aligned human face, but it will
degrade dramatically for not-aligned faces. To overcome the
limit of this approach, a better method named independent
component analysis (ICA) [7] and [8] is presented, whose task
is to find basis functions which are local and give good
1-4244-0332-4/06/$20.00 ©2006 IEEE
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Jiwen Lu and Wanjun Chen
Department of Information Science
Xi’an University of Technology
Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China
T T
lujiwen@xaut.edu.cn
representation of face images. ICA has a number of
advantages over PCA. First, ICA can decorrelate high-order
statistics while PCA only decorrelate second-order statistics.
Second, ICA basis vectors are more spatially local than PCA
basis vectors and it is usually related to local descriptions such
as edges and facial expression variations. As face is a non-
rigid object, local representation of faces will reduce the
sensitivity of the face variations due to different facial
expressions and pose variations.
Support vector machine (SVM) [3], [9] and [10] is a new
classifier which has high generalization capabilities in many
tasks especially in the object recognition problem. SVM is
based on structural risk minimization, which is the expectation
of the test error for the trained machine. As a recent advances
theory in statistical learning principle, SVM has made it
possible to obtain high accuracies for the object recognition.
Early researchers found that variations in facial expressions
mainly affect high-frequency components of the face,
therefore, we apply wavelet transform to original face image
and extract feature in the low frequency which can overcome
the expression and light variety. Based on this point, this paper
put forward an automatic face recognition method using ICA
and SVM.
The main advantages of our approach in this paper are as
bellow: (1) based on wavelet transform and ICA [8] and [11],
we make a meaningful attempt to human face feature
extraction. (2) Two public available face databases, namely
Yale University and Olivetti Research Laboratory face
databases are selected to test our method and it proves that this
method can perform well in face recognition. (3) Two
classifiers namely nearest neighbor (NN) and fuzzy support
vector machine (FSVM) are applied to face recognition and
experimental results are compared with the two different
classifiers. (4) It is easy to implement and has better
recognition accuracy. The remainder sections of this paper are
organized as follows: in the next section, face image feature
extraction using wavelet transform and ICA is proposed while
the final experimental results and recognition accuracy is
given in sections 3. At last, Section 4 concludes this paper and
put forward future research direction of this field.
II. FACE IMAGE FEATURE EXTRACTION USING WAVELET
TRANSFORM AND INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS
A. Perform wavelet transform on face image
 Information in different frequency bands plays different
role in face recognition. Low frequency components
contribute to the global description while high-frequency
components contribute to the details in face recognition. Only
a small variation of face expression will affect all frequency
components but it mainly affects high frequency components.
Therefore, we can consider that the effect of different facial
expressions can be attenuated by removing the most high-
frequency components and the low-frequency components and
few high-frequency components are sufficient for recognition.
Wavelet transform represents a signal by localizing it in both
time and frequency domains and it divides an image into four
different frequency bands in each level of decomposition.
Decomposing a face image using wavelet transform, the effect
of different facial expressions can be attenuated by removing
the high frequency components. Wavelet transform for face
image can bring us some advantages: (1) after decomposing
face image using wavelet transform, four different frequency
bands, namely LL, LH, HL and HH are achieved and for
further decomposing the low-frequency image, multi-
resolution analysis, which has been widely performed in
image processing especially for achieving the global and
details of face image can be performed. (2) If n-level of
wavelet decomposition is applied to the face image, the
resolution of the low-frequency subband is greatly less than
the resolution of the original face image and it is effective for
reducing the space dimension of the original data.
Fig.1 shows that the decomposition process through
applying the 2D wavelet transform on a face image. Here we
decompose one original face image into two level using
Daubechies wavelet. The original image can be decomposed
into four subband images in the processing of each level of
decomposition.
Fig. 1 2D wavelet decomposition of one image in ORL database
The subband LL is the low-frequency component of the
original image, LH is the low frequency component in the
horizontal direction, HL is the low frequency component in
the vertical direction and HH is the high-frequency component
of the original image. According to wavelet theory, high-
frequency is more sensitive to facial variation and HH is most
sensitive while LL features are most insensitive to the facial
expressions. Therefore all LL subband coefficients and several
high subband coefficients are selected to recognition and two-
level of wavelet decomposition is applied in this paper.
B. Feature extraction using ICA
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ICA is a new signal processing technique for extracting
independent variables from a mixture of signals and its basic
idea is to represent a set of random variables using basic
functions, where the components are statistically independent
or as independent as possible. It has become one recent
powerful technique in the field of image processing and
pattern recognition. The concept of ICA can be seen as a
generational of principal component analysis (PCA). PCA
tries to obtain a representation of the input signals based on
uncorrelated variables, where ICA provides a representation
based on statistically independent variables. PCA only
imposes independence up to the second order while ICA
represents a set of random variables using basis functions,
where the components are statistically independent or as
independent as possible. Let us denote the observed
variables xi as a vector with zero-mean random
variable X = ( x1 , x 2 , , x m ) T , the component variables s i as a
vector S = ( s1 , s 2 ,  , s n ) T with the model AS
X = AS (1)
where A is an unknown m × n matrix of full rank, called the
mixing or feature matrix. The column of A represent features
and s i signals the amplitude of the ith feature in the observed
data x
Currently, all ICA algorithms can be divided into two
approaches such as minimizing or maximizing some relevant
criteria functions and stochastic gradient methods [8]. Both
algorithms have limitations either requiring complex matrix
operation or convergence rate is very slow. Hyvarinen
introduce an algorithm using a very simple and efficient, fix-
point iteration algorithm finding the local extrema of the
kurtosis of a linear combination of the observed variables,
namely FastICA. More details about this algorithm can be
seen in literature [8].
Applying FatstICA on feature extraction of face image,
the random variables will be the training face images. We
select ten face images to construct the matrix X and make use
of fixed-point algorithm to calculate matrix A and S . Let xi'
be a one-dimension vector of face image which is decomposed
using wavelet transform, the training image set
{ x1' , x 2' ,  , x n' } with m random variables which are assumed to
be linear component of n unknown ICs is constructed, which
denoted by s1' , s 2' , , s n' .Then the relationship between
X and S can be modelled as X = AS . For this relationship,
each vector xi' can be represented by a linear combination of
s1 , s 2 , , s n with weighting a i1 , a i 2 , , a in . Therefore, the feature
matrix A can be considered as the features of all the training
face images, which are from low-frequency of the original
face images.
According to ICA theory, the matrix S contains all the
independent components, which are calculated from a set of
face images. The matrix AS can reconstruct the original
signals X . To reduce the computation cost, we should choose
some independent components (ICs) using A .To achieve this
goal, we select some ICs from A in the way that the ratio of
the within-class scatter and between-class scatter is minimized Bi , j = min{−1,− Di ( x)} i≠ j (7)
[5]. The method is proposed as follows.
If the matrix X contains n individual persons and each Then, we can classify the test sample according to (8)
person has m face images, aij represents the entry at the ith F = ω , ωi = arg max mi ( x) (8)
i =1, 2 ,,n
row and the jth column. W j , which is called as the mean of Where
within-class distance in the jth column, is then given by mi ( x) = min Bi , j ( x) (9)
j =1, 2 ,,n
n m m
1
Wj = ∑∑∑
nm(m −1) i=1 u=1 v=1
(a(i−1)m+u, j − a(i−1)m+v, j )2 (2) III. RECOGNITION AND E XPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Two public available face databases, namely, Yale
B j , which is called as the mean of between-class distance in University and Olivetti Research Laboratory face databases
the jth column: are selected to evaluate the performance of our proposed
n n system. The Yale face database adopted in this paper is just
1
Bj = ∑∑ ρ (a s' , j − at' , j )
n ( m − 1) s =1 t =1
(3) portion of the whole Yale face database, which contains all
frontal view images with different facial expression and here
where we adopted consists of ten persons and each person has nine
1 m different views images. There are forty persons in the whole
a i' , j = ∑ a( i−1) m+u , j
m u =1
(4) Olivetti face image database and we use the whole face image
for training and recognition. There existing ten different facial
In this paper, we employ the ratio of within-class distance and images in the dataset such as various expressions, small
between-class distance to select stable mixing feature occlusions and orientations. Two person face image in Olivetti
from A .The ratio γ j is defined as database and Yale database which contains different views can
be seen in Fig.2 and 3.
Wj
γj = (5)
Bj
From the definition of γ j , the smaller γ j is, the better the
classifier will be. Using (5), we choose the smallest γ j and
select the top k ( k < n ) column features from A and S . If there
is a zero value γ j , one IC is sufficient for recognize all face
images. Generally this is a very special case and seldom
happens in practice. To find the best γ j for recognition, we
Fig. 2 E xamples of various view images in ORL face database
can calculate the recognition accuracy for each value of γ j ,
E

then we can find the best γ j used for recognition. The

selection rules are as follows:
(1) Recognition accuracy should be maximized;
(2) For the same performance, we select ICs with the
smallest value of γ j .
After extracting the face feature through ICA, we will
design the classifier for classification. The simplest classifier
is the nearest neighbour classifier. Recently, support vector Fig. 2 E xamples of various view images in Yale face database
E

machine (SVM) classifier has been regarded as one powerful

classification approach in pattern analysis and data mining.
Traditional SVM is generally designed to classify two class
data and regard multiple class recognition as multiple 2-class
classification. Even SVM can perform well in recognition,
there may still exists some problem when one sample has the
same possibility to multiple classes. Therefore, fuzzy SVM,
which applies fuzzy membership function, is presented in this
paper to overcome this problem.
Let Bi , j represent the optimal classification plane from
ith class to jth class function, denoting:
Bi , j = min{1, Di ( x)} i= j
For all databases, all images adopted for training and
recognition in our algorithm are scaled into 128 × 128 for the
convenience of using wavelet transform and ICA. SVM
classifier is a 2-class classifier and there are two options for
us: one is using N SVMs ( N being the number of classes)
while another is separating one class from the rest or using
N ( N − 1) / 2 SVMs one for each pair of class. We select the first
option in our experiments because it is less complex. Table 1,
2 and 3 give the control experiment results on the two datasets
as follows:
(6) TABLE 1. THE RECOGNITION RESULTS USING THE NN CLASSIFIER

and

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 Yale database Olivetti database greatly and extract main face information which is sufficient
25 ICs Using all 40 ICs Using all for recognition.
selected ICs selected ICs (3) A criterion that not all ICs are useful for face
Rank 1 90.0% 90.0% 80.0% 75.0%
recognition is demonstrated and a rule for selecting ICs is
proposed.
Rank 2 95.0% 91.5% 85.0% 80.0% Finally, although the experimental results show that ICA
can give good performance on face images with different
Rank 3 96.5% 95.0% 87.5% 85.5% expression and orientations, there is still a limitation that the
computational load of calculating ICs is very high even if we
T
adopt the FastICA algorithm. Therefore, developing a more
accurate and fast ICA algorithm is the main research in our
TABLE 2. THE RECOGNITION RESULTS USING THE NN CLASSIFIER
future work and we believe that the recognition rate will
improve and increase if a better computation of ICs is
Yale database Olivetti database
available.
25 ICs Using all 40 ICs Using all
selected ICs selected ICs ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Rank 1 92.5% 91.5% 82.5% 77.5%
The authors would like to express their thanks to Yale
University and Olivetti Research Laboratory for their standard
Rank 2 95.0% 93.5% 87.5% 85.0%
public face databases to test our algorithm. Portion of the
Rank 3 96.6% 94.7% 92.5% 87.5%
research in this paper uses Yale and Olivetti databases
collected by Yale University and Olivetti Research
Laboratory. The author would also like to thank Dr Hyvarinen
for providing the fixed-point algorithm for independent
TABLE 3. THE RECOGNITION RESULTS USING THE NN CLASSIFIER
component analysis.
Yale database Olivetti database REFERENCES
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