Abstract

Abstract—A general and efficient design approach using a radial basis function (RBF) neural classifier to cope with small training sets of high dimension, which is a problem frequently encountered in face recognition, is presented in this paper. In order to avoid overfitting and reduce the computational burden, face features are first extracted by the principal component analysis (PCA) method. Then, the resulting features are further processed by the Fisher’s linear discriminant (FLD) technique to acquire lower-dimensional discriminant patterns. A novel paradigm is proposed whereby data information is encapsulated in determining the structure and ini-tial parameters of the RBF neural classifier before learning takes place. A hybrid learning algorithm is used to train the RBF neural networks so that the dimension of the search space is drastically re-duced in the gradient paradigm. Simulation results conducted on the ORL database show that the system achieves excellent perfor-mance both in terms of error rates of classification and learning efficiency. Index Terms—Face recognition, Fisher’s linear discriminant, ORL database, principal component analysis, radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, small training sets of high dimension. I.