An Ensemble Classifier using Two Dimensional LDA

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) has been successfully applied for dimension reduction in face recognition. However, LDA requires the transformation of a face image to a one-dimensional vector and this process can cause the correlation information among neighboring pixels to be disregarded. On the other hand, 2D-LDA uses 2D images directly without a transformation process and it has been shown to be superior to the traditional LDA. Nevertheless, there are some problems in 2D-LDA. First, it is difficult to determine the optimal number of feature vectors in a reduced dimensional space. Second, the size of rectangular windows used in 2D-LDA makes strong impacts on classification accuracies but there is no reliable way to determine an optimal window size. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to overcome those problems in 2D-LDA. We adopt an ensemble approach which combines several classifiers obtained by utilizing various window sizes. And a practical method to determine the number of feature vectors is also presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can overcome the difficulties with choosing an optimal window size and the number of feature vectors.