Sparsity adaptive matching pursuit for face recognition

Abstract Sparse representation methods have exhibited promising performance for pattern recognition. However, these methods largely rely on the data sparsity available in advance and are usually sensitive to noise in the training samples. To solve these problems, this paper presents sparsity adaptive matching pursuit based sparse representation for face recognition (SAMPSR). This method adaptively explores the valid training samples that exactly represent the test via iterative updating. Next, the test samples are reconstructed via the valid training samples, and classification is performed subsequently. The two-phase strategy helps to improve the discriminating power of class probability distribution, and thus alleviates effect of the noise from the training samples to some extent and correctly performs classification. In addition, the method solves the sparse coefficient by comparing the residual between the test sample and the reconstructed sample instead of using the sparsity. A large number of experiments show that our method achieves promising performance.