Feature Extraction via Sparse Difference Embedding (SDE)

The traditional feature extraction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) cannot obtain the local structure of the samples, and locally linear embedding (LLE) cannot obtain the global structure of the samples. However, a common drawback of existing PCA and LLE algorithm is that they cannot deal well with the sparse problem of the samples. Therefore, by integrating the globality of PCA and the locality of LLE with a sparse constraint, we developed an improved and unsupervised difference algorithm called Sparse Difference Embedding (SDE), for dimensionality reduction of high-dimensional data in small sample size problems. Significantly differing from the existing PCA and LLE algorithms, SDE seeks to find a set of perfect projections that can not only impact the locality of intraclass and maximize the globality of interclass, but can also simultaneously use the Lasso regression to obtain a sparse transformation matrix. This characteristic makes SDE more intuitive and more powerful than PCA and LLE. At last, the proposed algorithm was estimated through experiments using the Yale and AR face image databases and the USPS handwriting digital databases. The experimental results show that SDE outperforms PCA LLE and UDP attributed to its sparse discriminating characteristics, which also indicates that the SDE is an effective method for face recognition.