Face recognition using independent component analysis and support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVM) and independent component analysis (ICA) are two powerful and relatively recent techniques. SVMs are classifiers which have demonstrated high generalization capabilities in many different tasks, including the object recognition problem. ICA is a feature extraction technique which can be considered a generalization of principal component analysis (PCA). ICA has been mainly used on the problem of blind signal separation. In this paper we combine these two techniques for the face recognition problem. Experiments were made on two different face databases, achieving very high recognition rates. As the results using the combination PCA/SVM were not very far from those obtained with ICA/SVM, our experiments suggest that SVMs are relatively insensitive to the representation space. Thus as the training time for ICA is much larger than that of PCA, this result indicates that the best practical combination is PCA with SVM. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.