Efficient face recognition method based on DCT and LDA

It has been demonstrated that the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is an effective approach in face recognition tasks. However, due to the high dimensionality of an image space, many LDA based approaches first use the principal component analysis (PCA) to project an image into a lower dimensional space, then perform the LDA transform to extract discriminant feature. But some useful discriminant information to the following LDA transform will be lost in the PCA step. To overcome these defects, a face recognition method based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the LDA is proposed. First the DCT is used to achieve dimension reduction, then LDA transform is performed on the lower space to extract features. Two face databases are used to test our method and the correct recognition rates of 97.5% and 96.0% are obtained respectively. The performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the PCA + LDA method and the results show that the method proposed outperforms the PCA + LDA method.