• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.19-29
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• 2003

This paper presents a novel hybrid classifier for face recognition with artificially generated virtual training samples. We utilize both the nearest neighbor approach in feature angle space and a connectionist model to obtain a synergy effect by combining the results of two heterogeneous classifiers. First, a classifier called the nearest feature angle (NFA), based on angular information, finds the most similar feature to the query from a given training set. Second, a classifier has been developed based on the recall of stored frontal projection of the query feature. It uses a frontal recall network (FRN) that finds the most similar frontal one among the stored frontal feature set. For FRN, we used an ensemble neural network consisting of multiple multiplayer perceptrons (MLPs), each of which is trained independently to enhance generalization capability. Further, both classifiers used the virtual training set generated adaptively, according to the spatial distribution of each person's training samples. Finally, the results of the two classifiers are combined to comprise the best matching class, and a corresponding similarit measure is used to make the final decision. The proposed classifier achieved an average classification rate of 96.33% against a large group of different test sets of images, and its average error rate is 61.5% that of the nearest feature line (NFL) method, and achieves a more robust classification performance.