On solving the face recognition problem with one training sample per subject

The lack of adequate training samples and the considerable variations observed in the available image collections due to aging, illumination and pose variations are the two key technical barriers that appearance-based face recognition solutions have to overcome. It is a well-documented fact that their performance deteriorates rapidly when the number of training samples is smaller than the dimensionality of the image space. This is especially true for face recognition applications where only one training sample per subject is available. In this paper, a recognition framework based on the concept of the so-called generic learning is introduced as an attempt to boost the performance of traditional appearance-based recognition solutions in the one training sample application scenario. Different from contemporary approaches, the proposed solution learns the intrinsic properties of the subjects to be recognized using a generic training database which consists of images from subjects other than those under consideration. Many state-of-the-art face recognition solutions can be readily integrated in the proposed framework. A novel multi-learner framework is also proposed to further boost recognition performance. Extensive experimentation reported in the paper suggests that the proposed framework provides a comprehensive solution and achieves lower error recognition rate when considered in the context of one training sample face recognition problem. (c) 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.