RBECA: A regularized Bi-partitioned entropy component analysis for human face recognition

This paper presents a novel approach for Human Face Recognition, namely Regularized Bi-partitioned Entropy Component Analysis (RBECA). This conservative approach regularizes the kernel entropy components by deterring the noise and affecting the lower entropy regions area, making the method robust to noise. The kernel feature space, formed by the kernel entropy component analysis (KECA), is divided into two partitions: the High Entropy Space (HES) and the Low Entropy Space (LES). The noise-laden low entropy spectrum is regularized by predicting entropy values obtained from the information-filled High Entropy Spectrum. The corresponding projection vectors are adjusted accordingly. A null space, comprising the negligible information and many dimensions, is eliminated using a Golden Search minimization function at two stages. The method retains the maximum entropy property and high recognition accuracy while using the optimum number of features. This resultant feature vector is classified using the cosine similarity measure. The algorithm is successfully tested on several benchmark databases like AR, FERET, FRAV2D, and LFW, using standard protocols and compared with other competitive methods. The proposed method achieves much better recognition accuracy than other well-known methods like PCA, ICA, KPCA, KECA,LGBP, ERE, etc., in all considered cases. Moreover, we have also proposed a CNN for the comparative analysis. For unbiased or fair performance evaluation, the sensitivity and specificity are also reported. • A noise robust RBECA method is proposed for human face recognition. • The proposed method requires a lower number of features than KECA. • The highest level of discriminatory information is retained. • The algorithm is successfully trained and tested on several benchmark face databases. • A deep learning CNN framework is also implemented for comparative analysis.