Sparsely Encoded Local Descriptor for face recognition

In this paper, a novel Sparsely Encoded Local Descriptor (SELD) is proposed for face recognition. Compared with K-means or Random-projection tree based previous methods, sparsity constraint is introduced in our dictionary learning and sequent image encoding, which implies more stable and discriminative face representation. Sparse coding also leads to an image descriptor of summation of sparse coefficient vectors, which is quite different from existing code-words appearance frequency(/histogram)-based descriptors. Extensive experiments on both FERET and challenging LFW database show the effectiveness of the proposed SELD method. Especially on the LFW dataset, recognition accuracy comparable to the best known results is achieved.