Analysis of Eigenvalue Correction Applied to Biometrics

Eigenvalue estimation plays an important role in biometrics. However, if the number of samples is limited, estimates are significantly biased. In this article we analyse the influence of this bias on the error rates of PCA/LDA based verification systems, using both synthetic data with realistic parameters and real biometric data. Results of bias correction in the verification systems differ considerable between synthetic data and real data: while the bias is responsible for a large part of classification errors in the synthetic facial data, compensation of the bias in real facial data leads only to marginal improvements.