Eigenface

Eigenfaces is the name given to a set of eigenvectors when they are used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition. The approach of using eigenfaces for recognition was developed by Sirovich and Kirby (1987) and used by Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland in face classification. The eigenvectors are derived from the covariance matrix of the probability distribution over the high-dimensional vector space of face images. The eigenfaces themselves form a basis set of all images used to construct the covariance matrix. This produces dimension reduction by allowing the smaller set of basis images to represent the original training images. Classification can be achieved by comparing how faces are represented by the basis set.

History

The Eigenface approach began with a search for a low-dimensional representation of face images. Sirovich and Kirby (1987) showed that Principal Component Analysis could be used on a collection of face images to form a set of basis features. These basis images, known as Eigenpictures, could be linearly combined to reconstruct images in the original training set. If the training set consists of M images, principal component analysis could form a basis set of N images, where N < M. The reconstruction error is reduced by increasing the number of eigenpictures, however the number needed is always chosen less than M. For example if you need to generate a number of N eigenfaces for a training set of M face images, you can say that each face image can be made up of "proportions" of all this K "features" or eigenfaces : Face image1 = (23% of E1) + (2% of E2) + (51% of E3)+...+(1% En).