Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
DOI 10.1007/s11263-008-0161-5
Optimal Local Basis: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
for Face Recognition
Mehrtash T. Harandi · Majid Nili Ahmadabadi ·
Babak N. Araabi
Received: 9 January 2008 / Accepted: 22 July 2008 / Published online: 19 August 2008
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract This paper presents a novel learning approach for
Face Recognition by introducing Optimal Local Basis. Op-
timal local bases are a set of basis derived by reinforcement
learning to represent the face space locally. The reinforce-
ment signal is designed to be correlated to the recognition
accuracy. The optimal local bases are derived then by find-
ing the most discriminant features for different parts of the
face space, which represents either different individuals or
different expressions, orientations, poses, illuminations, and
other variants of the same individual. Therefore, unlike most
of the existing approaches that solve the recognition prob-
lem by using a single basis for all individuals, our proposed
method benefits from local information by incorporating dif-
ferent bases for its decision. We also introduce a novel clas-
sification scheme that uses reinforcement signal to build a
similarity measure in a non-metric space.
Experiments on AR, PIE, ORL and YALE databases indi-
cate that the proposed method facilitates robust face recogni-
tion under pose, illumination and expression variations. The
performance of our method is compared with that of Eigen-
M.T. Harandi () · M. Nili Ahmadabadi · B.N. Araabi
Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence,
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
e-mail: mharandi@ece.ut.ac.ir
M. Nili Ahmadabadi
e-mail: mnili@ut.ac.ir
B.N. Araabi
e-mail: araabi@ut.ac.ir
M.T. Harandi · M. Nili Ahmadabadi · B.N. Araabi
School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Studies in Theoretical
Physics and Mathematics, Tehran, Iran
face, Fisherface, Subclass Discriminant Analysis, and Ran-
dom Subspace LDA methods as well.
Keywords Face recognition · Feature selection ·
Reinforcement learning
1 Introduction
Individual identification through face recognition is an im-
portant and crucial ability of humans in effective com-
munication and interactions. Interest in producing artificial
face recognizers has been grown rapidly during the past
ten years, mainly because of its various practical applica-
tions such as surveillance, identification, authentication, ac-
cess control, and Mug shot searching. Among different ap-
proaches devised for face recognition, the widely studied
ones are the statistical learning methods that try to derive
an appropriate basis for face representation (Turk and Pent-
land 1991; Belhumeur et al. 1997; Bartlett et al. 2002). The
reason behind deriving a basis is because a complete ba-
sis makes the derivation of unique image representations
suitable for processes like image retrieval and object recog-
nition. Statistical learning theory also offers a lower di-
mensional description of faces. The lower dimensional de-
scription is crucial in learning, as the number of examples
required for achieving a given performance exponentially
grows with the dimension of the representation space. On
the other hand, low dimensional representations of visual
objects have some biological roots as suggested by Edel-
man and Intrator (1990): “perceptual tasks such as similar-
ity judgment tend to be performed on a low-dimensional
representation of the sensory data.” Principal Component
Analysis (PCA) (Turk and Pentland 1991; Yang et al. 2004;
Feng et al. 2002), Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA)
192
(Belhumeur et al. 1997), Subclass Discriminant Analysis
(SDA) (Manli and Martinez 2006), Independent Compo-
nent Analysis (ICA) (Bartlett et al. 2002; Liu and Wech-
sler 2003), Locality Preserving Projections (LPP) (He et al.
2005; Cai et al. 2006), kernel machines (Kim et al. 2002;
Liu 2004; Lu et al. 2003) and hybrid methods (Yang et al.
2005) are successful examples of applying statistical learn-
ing theory to face recognition by introducing a single ba-
sis for face representation. This is where some important
questions come to mind: Is a holistic basis sufficient for a
complicated task like face recognition or we have to intro-
duce different bases for different parts of face space (in-
dividuals) to achieve best practically possible recognition?
How does a single basis may interpret the holistic and fea-
ture analysis behaviors (Zhao et al. 2003) of human be-
ings? Apparently using the same projection for all indi-
viduals is in contrast with human feature analysis behav-
ior in face recognition. Several studies showed that even
the derived basis can be further improved by searching for
the most discriminant directions using evolutionary algo-
rithms like evolutionary pursuit (Liu and Wechsler 2000;
Harandi et al. 2004), GA-Fisher (Zheng et al. 2005) and in-
dividual/combinatorial feature selection methods (Liu and
Motoda 1998; Ekenel and Sankur 2004).
Several other approaches also exist in the area of face
recognition to tackle the problem by introducing different
bases. The very first approach was View-based Eigenspaces
proposed by Moghaddam (Pentland et al. 1994). In his work,
Moghaddam suggested to group images taken from a spe-
cific view together and build a specific space for each view.
The idea is extended by Kim to LDA sp aces with soft clus-
tering idea in 2005 (Kim and Kittler 2005). Wang introduced
random subspace LDA to generate a number of subspaces
randomly followed by fusing the result of recognition (Wang
and Tang 2006). In addition, mutual subspaces are also pro-
posed when several images from each class are available
(Yamaguchi et al. 1998).
Nevertheless each space in these mixture models is still
holistic in terms of individual representation and identifica-
tion. Furthermore, the clustering method used to form the
samples of each space, does not necessarily group the im-
ages to optimally extract their features (LDA in LLDA and
LDA mixture model and PCA features in View-based ap-
proach). One can also expect unacceptable generalization
ability if the number of samples in some clusters are not
sufficient.
In this paper, inspired by biological findings in human
face recognition, we present a novel idea to locally repre-
sent the face space by using the reinforcement learning (RL)
method. The main idea proposed in this paper is illustrated
as an example in Fig. 1. Considering the complex face space
manifold, our learning method tries to find the most discrim-
inant features for different parts of the space. Different parts
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
Fig. 1 An example of the proposed idea where, each subject is repre-
sented by its most discriminant features in the face space
of face space can be corresponds to different individuals or
even different expressions/poses/illuminations of an individ-
ual. These learned discriminant features are varied in num-
ber for different parts of the face space although they are
selected from a unique feature pool. This pool can be pro-
vided by any holistic algorithm. As the learned discriminant
features formed local basis for face spaces derived by statis-
tical learning methods, we called our method Optimal Local
Basis (OLB). The proposed method can be considered as
an extension to evolutionary algorithms (Liu and Wechsler
2000) in which only one optimal basis is sought for all in-
dividuals. However, in contrast, our approach tries to learn
one or several separate optimal basis/bases for each individ-
ual. We also provide a novel classification scheme to use RL
reward signal for taking its final decision in a non-metric
space. The proposed method is successfully tested on AR
(Martinez and Kak 2001), PIE (Sim et al. 2003), ORL (ORL
database) and YALE (Yale University Face Image Database)
datasets, which cover a wide range of variations such as dif-
ferent expressions, illuminations and poses. We apply our
method to face spaces derived by LDA and compare with
Eigenface, Fisherface, SDA and random subspace LDA in
terms of recognition accuracy.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2
provides general background on RL algorithm. In Sect. 3 our
method for optimal basis derivation using RL is introduced.
Section 4 presents the proposed class similarity measure and
OLB classifier. Section 5 describes the computational com-
plexity of the proposed method. Experimental results are de-
scribed in Sect. 6. Section 7 provides some interesting prop-
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
erties of the proposed algorithm followed by conclusion re-
marks and suggestions for future in Sect. 8.
2 Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning is a machine learning technique
for solving sequential decision problems. Various decision
problems in real life are sequential in nature. In these prob-
lems the received reward does not depend on an isolated
decision but rather on a sequence of decisions. Therefore,
learning agent maximizes a combination of its immediate
and delayed rewards.
In RL, at each moment t, learning agent senses the en-
vironment in state st ∈ S and takes an action at ∈ A where
S and A denote the sets of agent’s states and its available
actions, respectively. Agent’s action causes a state transition
and reward rt from the environment. The expected value of
the received reward by following an arbitrary policy π from
an initial state st is given by
∞  tive points with different class labels ωj in the space defined
 by Ti .
V (st ) = E
π i
γ rt+i (1)
i=0
where rt+i is the reward received in state st+i using pol-
icy π , and γ ∈ [0, 1) is a discount factor that balances de-
layed versus instant rewards. The learning problem is mod-
eled as the best mapping from states into actions π : S → A
i.e. finding the policy that maximizes the sum of expected
rewards:
π ∗ = arg max Vπ (s), ∀s ∈ S (2)
π
There are different RL methods to find the optimum pol-
icy; e.g. Q-learning and Sarsa (Sutton and Barto 1998). In
this paper we use Q-learning to estimate optimal local bases.
3 Optimal Local Basis Learning Using RL
We will introduce our approach in this section. We as-
sume that we are encountering a classification problem
where the feature vectors are represented by N dimen-
sional vectors and each datum belongs to one of the classes
{ω1 , ω2 , . . . , ωC }. An OLB is defined as a three-tuple
(xi , ωi , Ti ), where xi ∈ RN is the OLB representative point,
ωi ∈ {ω1 , ω2 , . . . , ωC } is the OLB class label, Ti ∈ N is a
binary vector expressing the set of features associated with
the OLB, and N is the set of all the N dimensional bi-
nary vectors excluding the null binary vector. Therefore,
N have 2N − 1 members. For instance, in a face recog-
nition task where the features are obtained by PCA, xi is
the representation of a sample face in the Eigenface space,
193
N is the number of Eigenfaces, and Ti is the binary vector
demonstrating which Eigenfaces are the optimal subset to
describe xi . For example in Fig. 1, the optimal binary vec-
tor for the subject A is a binary vector with four elements
equal to one whereas the OLB optimal binary vector for the
subject B has only two ones. The location of the ones in the
OLB optimal binary vector determines which features are
optimal for describing the underlying OLB. In this sense,
the binary vector Ti can be considered as a feature selection
mapping from a high dimensional space into a lower dimen-
sional one. In sequel, the set of optimum local features, OLB
optimal binary vector, and Ti are used interchangeably.
In solving a classification problem, the problem is mod-
eled by a set of OLBs. The OLB learning algorithm tries
to find the OLB optimal binary vector Ti for each OLB by
maximizing the discrimination power of its representative
point xi from other representative points xj , j = i. More
specifically the learning process tries to find the best Ti so
that all the other representative points xj , j = i with the
same class label ωi are seen closer to xi than the representa-
In its formal description, OLB derivation algorithm can
be regarded as a manifold learning (Roseis and Saul 2000)
approach; however, here we would like to explore another
view of the OLB algorithm; which is closely related to
some of interesting findings in Biology and Neuroscience.
Considering a classification problem defined over a feature
space, features can be categorized either as global or local
based on the way they are used in the classification task.
In most classification algorithms, a unique set of features
is identically selected to separate all the classes over the
feature space. Such features are called global features. On
the other hand, most often if we consider a portion of fea-
ture space, it is possible to find a handful of features to
characterize that portion more efficiently as compared with
global features. Such features may be labeled as local fea-
tures. Global features are ideal, provided that features ap-
propriateness for classification does not vary much across
different classes. That is, the same set of features performs
equally well to separate all the classes. However, in most
classification problems, it is very difficult or even impracti-
cal to find such an optimal set of global features. Moreover,
all features may not always be processed and used due to
computational and/or time resource limitations. Unlike the
global features, the local features may vary on different por-
tions of the feature space. The OLB algorithm is a practical
approach to obtain the local features in a complex classifica-
tion task like face recognition; because Ti can be considered
as the subset of most discriminant features from the OLB
representative point of view. It is interesting to know that
the opportunistic behavior of human face recognition (Zhao
et al. 2003) and recent theories of face spaces can also be
194 Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204

partially modeled by the OLB algorithm. The theory of face In sequel, we introduce the proposed learning method in
space is the most common theoretical framework proposed more details. In particular Sect. 3.1 proposes the learning al-
for face recognition in both computational and psycholog- gorithm based on Q-learning—a widely used implementa-
ical literature (O’Toole et al. 1999). In most computational tion of reinforcement learning (Sutton and Barto 1998)—to
researches, a fixed face space with holistic features is as- estimate the discrimination factors. In Sect. 3.2 we provide
sumed however some psychological findings challenge the different methods for selecting optimal features for each
proposition that the feature space is ever holistic or fixed. It OLB. Estimated OLBs are integrated into a classification
means, an expert’s feature space may become reorganized schema in Sect. 4. A preliminary study on the OLB learn-
and tuned to perform a categorization task more efficiently ing algorithm is reported in Harandi et al. (2004).
(Carbon 2003). In a similar way, the OLB algorithm man-
ages to find the most discriminant features of each represen- 3.1 The Learning Method
tative point. As a result, it, tunes and reorganizes the face
space to boost the recognition performance from each local In this section, our method for assigning discrimination
observer’s point of view. factor to each feature of an OLB using RL is presented.
Person-specific image-based approaches are recently in- We assume that the learning process is applied to the
troduced with promising results for face recognition (Ma et OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ) where the classification problem is mod-
al. 2007; Bicego et al. 2006; Ahonen et al. 2006). In Ma eled by the set {OLB(x1 , ω1 , T1 ), OLB(x2 , ω2 , T2 ), . . . ,
et al. (2007) and Bicego et al. (2006), the SIFT operator— OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ), . . . , OLB(xm , ωm , Tm )}. Here m is the
introduced by Lowe (2004)—is used to detect the key points number of OLBs and m ≥ C.
of each gallery image and to extract the scale/rotation in- In order to use RL, we should model the problem as
variant features for each key point. For identifying a probe a Markov decision process and design the reward func-
image, its SIFT features are compared with those of each tion. Figure 2 shows a schematic view of the proposed
gallery image and the closest match is selected as the system where, the learning process is modeled as agent-
recognition result. Our approach and the mentioned person- environment interaction. For each OLB, the corresponding
specific methods resemble each other at the first glance; agent traverses the feature space and at each step selects
because, in both algorithms, each training sample is repre- a feature from the available features. The environment re-
sented by a set of specific features. However, our method dif- sponds the agent completing an action (feature selection) by
fers from the person-specific methods in two major aspects.
Firstly, our method is independent of the feature space and
theoretically can be used with different features. Secondly,
the nature of the feature selection approaches is different.
In fact, we find a set of most discriminant features for each
sample image by looking at its neighbor images while dis-
crimination power is not directly considered in extraction of
features in the person-specific methods.
Selection of the best feature subset in an N dimensional
space demands for examining 2N − 1 possibilities per OLB.
Searching such a space is computationally exhaustive even
for medium size feature spaces. In order to search the feature
space more efficiently, the feature selection task is modeled
as an expected reward maximization problem in an nth order
Markov Decision Process (MDP). This MDP model drasti-
cally reduces the computational complexity of the problem;
as in an nth order MDP the learner needs to keep its n last
states and decisions. To derive the OLB optimal binary vec-
tor Ti , the problem is divided into two steps. In the first
step we obtain a sorted feature set by learning discrimina-
tion factors of all the features describing the OLB represen-
tative point using RL. The discrimination factor shows how
discriminative the corresponding feature is for classifying its
representative point along with the other features. In the sec-
ond step, the best subset of features is selected as the OLB
optimum local features. Fig. 2 A schematic view of the learning system
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
Fig. 3 A nth order MDP model of the environment, where fjs is the j th selected feature and ai is the agent’s action at state si
a reward signal. The agent’s task is to learn those features
for OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ) that result in the collection of maximum
expected reward.
The environment is modeled as an nth order MDP where
the current state Si is represented merely by n last selected
s ,fs s (ωi = ωj ) in an Euclidean space. This criterion is equiv-
features (fi−n i−n+1 , . . . , fi ) as shown in Fig. 3. In state
Si agent chooses its decision ai based on its n last de-
s ,fs s • Maximizing the discrimination of xi from the representa-
cision (fi−n i−n+1 , . . . , fi ) and available remaining fea-
tures. The selected features are kept in binary vector h of
length N , where N is the dimension of feature space. This
is to ensure that a feature is not selected more than once.
Whenever a feature is selected the corresponding element
of vector h becomes one. The agent can select only those
features that their corresponding elements in h are zero.
The value of agent’s state-action pairs are modeled by
n + 1 Q-tables {Q0 , Q1 , Q2 , . . . , Qn } of size {N, N ×
N, N × N × N, . . . , N × N × · · · × N}. The element
n+1
Qj (i0 , i1 , . . . , ij −1 , ij ) of the Q-table Qj demonstrates the
expected value of received reward by selecting feature ij
when the features i0 , i1 , . . . , ij −1 are already selected in j
previous steps. For example in a first order MDP, element
(i0 , i1 ) of Q1 demonstrate the expected reward of selecting
direction i1 when i0 is previously selected. The updating
equations for Q-learning algorithm is
Qj (i0 , i1 , . . . , ij −1 , ij )
= Qj (i0 , i1 , . . . , ij −1 , ij )
N fj (ωi ) =
+ α r + γ max Qj (i1 , i2 , . . . , ij , il )
l=1
− Qj (i0 , i1 , . . . , ij −1 , ij ) (3)
where Qj (i0 , i1 , . . . , ij −1 , ij ) is the expected reward of
selecting feature ij when the agent is in the state (i0 ,
i1 , . . . , ij −1 ); Qj (i1 , i2 , . . . , ij , il ) is the expected reward of
selecting il one step after selecting feature ij ; r is the re-
ceived reward of selecting feature ij ; α (0 < α ≤ 1) is the
learning rate; and γ (0 ≤ γ ≤ 1) is the discount factor. In
the learning phase, the agent traverses the environment with
the ε Greedy policy, i.e. in each state the agent selects the
best action with probability 1 − ε while it is possible for the
agent to choose a random action with the probability of ε.
195
The reward signal is designed to satisfy the following cri-
teria:
• Narrowing the distance between xi and the other rep-
resentative points xj ; j = i with the same class labels
alent to minimize intra-set distance for each class.
tive points xj ; j = i with different class labels (ωi = ωj ).
This criterion is equivalent to maximize inter-set dis-
tances for classes. In this process, those features that seg-
regate xi from the representative points with different
class labels are preferred.
The critic (the environment) evaluates the selected fea-
tures by examining the class labels of the K nearest neigh-
bors of xi . To do this, all representative points xj , j =
1, . . . , m are projected into the space defined by the selected
features, pj = diag(xj ⊗ h), j = 1, . . . , m. Then the K near-
est neighbors of pi is obtained using L2 norm. The received
reward is formulated as

K
r= (fj (ωi ) × RC (j ) + (1 − fj (ωi )) × PN C (j )) (4)
j =1
In (4) fj (ωi ) is a binary value function representing
whether the j th neighbor has the same class label as ωi or
not:
⎧
⎨1 if the j th neighbor has the same class
label as ωi (5)
⎩
0 otherwise
RC (j ) and PN C (j ) are the reward and punishment that
the agent receives for correct and incorrect hits, respectively.
It means that, the agent receives reward RC (j ) when the
j th neighbor has the same class label as ωi and punishment
PN C (j ) otherwise. The maximum and minimum expected
 K
rewards are K j =1 RC (j ) and j =1 PN C (j ), respectively.
Each episode of RL has at last N steps (the number of avail-
able features). The episode could be terminated sooner if
the agent receives the maximum reward in Chits consequent
steps. The agent must visit the feature space sufficiently
in order to learn effectively. The learning algorithm can be
summarized as shown in Table 1.
196
Table 1 OLB derivation algorithm
Algorithm OLB Learning
Select randomly an OLB OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ) from the training dataset
{OLB(x1 , ω1 , T1 ), OLB(x2 , ω2 , T2 ), . . . , OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ), . . . ,
OLB(xm , ωm , Tm )}.
Initialize the corresponding Q-tables randomly.
for iteration = 1 to _number_of_Episodes do
N a0 = arg max(Q0 (aj ))
  
h = 0, 0, . . . , 0
repeat
Select a feature ai = fi+1
s by ε greedy policy.
Update the selected feature vector, h(fi+1 s
) = 1.
Project all the representative points xj , j = 1, . . . , m
in training dataset into space defined by h using
pj = diag(xj ⊗ h).
Find the class labels of the K-nearest neighbors of the
projected data from pi .
Update the corresponding cell of Q-table according to (4).
until in Chits consequent steps, the agent receives the maximum
reward or if all the features are selected.
end for
In this paper, we confined our experiments to the first or-
der MDPs and face spaces derived by applying statistical
learning methods. As a result, in the context of our proposed
algorithm the words direction and feature are used inter-
changeably. The updating equations for Q-tables are given
in (6) and (7). Since the expected reward of selecting a direc-
tion right after i0 is coded in Q1 , Q1 table is used to update
the values in Q0 .
N
Q0 (i0 ) = Q0 (i0 ) + α r + γ max Q1 (i0 , il ) − Q0 (i0 ) (6)
l=1
Q1 (i0 , i1 ) = Q1 (i0 , i1 )
N
using the last n selected features and tracing the position
+ α r + γ max Q1 (i1 , il ) − Q1 (i0 , i1 ) (7)
l=1
3.2 Selecting the Most Appropriate Features
After completing the learning process, the set of most appro-
priate features for each OLB should be selected. Here, the
term “appropriate” is shorthand for “appropriate for discrim-
ination of an OLB”. Not only less appropriate features can-
not provide better discrimination for the underlying OLB,
but also they may deteriorate the effect of more appropriate
ones. Now, the question is how to determine the appropri-
ate features for each OLB. To do this, firstly the features are
sorted according to their discrimination using the available
Q-tables and then from the sorted features the optimal bi-
nary vector Ti is extracted.
To obtain a set of features in descending order of ap-
propriateness, we use the already learned Q-tables in recall
mode. For an nth order MDP, the first n appropriate fea-
tures are obtained by selecting the position of the maximum
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
Table 2 Sorting the features for a nth order MDP
Algorithm Sorting the features according to their appropriateness
fC =1
N
  
h = 1, 1, . . . 1
j
ordered_ features = (a0 )
h(a0 ) = 0
cState = (a0 )
while f C < n do
Select all the Q values described by cState in Qf C .
This is a vector of length N which is called
Row(Qf C ) = Qf C (cState, aj ), j = 1, . . . , N.
af C = arg maxj (Row(Qf C )|h(j ) = 1)
ordered_ features = (ordered_ features, af C )
rem_ features(af C ) = 0
cState = (a0 , a1 , . . . , af C )
fC =fC +1
end while
while f C ≤ N do
Select all the Q values described by State of Qn , Row(Qn )
= (cState, aj ), j = 1, . . . , N. This vector has length N.
af C = arg maxj (Row(Qn )|h(j ) = 1)
ordered_ features = (ordered_ features, af C )
h(af C ) = 0
cState = (af C−n , af C−n+1 , . . . , af C )
fC =fC +1
end while
in Qj , j = 0, 1, 2, . . . , n − 1, respectively. In each selection
step, the corresponding Q-table and the selected features are
used. After using the above process to find the first n features
in order of appropriateness, the rest of features are selected
of maximum in the Qn table. Therefore, selection of each
feature beyond nth selected one depends only on Qn table
along with the last n selected features.
As an example, for a second order MDP, we use the
Q0 to select the first optimal feature a0 . Then the se-
lected feature and Q1 is used and the second appro-
priate feature, a1 , is found by locating the maximum
considering a0 , i.e. a1 = arg maxj (Q1 (a0 , aj )). The re-
maining appropriate features are obtained from Q2 using
al = arg maxj (Q2 (al−2 , al−1 , aj ) | h(j ) = 1), l = 2, 3, . . . ,
N − 1, recursively, where h is the binary vector that keeps
track of the selected features in the previous steps. The
pseudo code of acquiring the ordered set of appropriate fea-
tures is shown in Table 2.
After obtaining the ordered features, we have to select a
subset of them. Three different methods can be devised here:
• Static method: Features with Q-values above a predefined
threshold are used in the decision process. A fixed thresh-
old is used for all OLBs.
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
• Adaptive method: Features with Q-values above a vary-
ing threshold are used in the decision process. The
varying threshold is selected proportional to the largest
Q-value or by a clustering method. In this method the
threshold varies for each OLB.
• Validation method: It is also possible to split the data
into validation and test subsets and then find the optimal
features using the validation subset. In this method the
threshold varies for each OLB too.
In this paper we use an adaptive method, which is based
on a two classes clustering. This is partly due to its perfor-
mance advantages over the static method and also its relative
simplicity compared to the validation method.
4 Class Similarity Measure and OLB Classifier
When the training phase is finished and the most appro-
priate features for each OLB are selected, we are ready to
build an OLB-based Classifier. To this end, we need to as-
sess the similarity of a query datum to all stored classes.
Simple similarity judgment based on ordinary distance mea-
sures on feature space does not work here since OLBs
have different dimensions and features; as illustrated in
Fig. 4. In this figure, the Euclidean distance between xq
and OLB(x1 , ω1 , T1 ) is d1 = (xq,1 − x1,1 )2 + (xq,4 − x1,4 )2
while the corresponding distance for OLB(x2 , ω2 , T2 ) is
d2 = (xq,1 − x2,1 )2 + (xq,2 − x2,2 )2
+ (xq,4 − x2,4 )2 + (xq,5 − x2,5 )2 .
In order to make different bases comparable, we use the
reward signal as the similarity measure. The similarity be-
tween a query datum xq and OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ) is defined by
first projecting xq and all the representative points xj , j =
Fig. 4 An illustration of
selected features for each OLB.
Due to differences in the
dimensions and the optimal
features of OLBs, it is
impractical to use Euclidean
norms as similarity measures
197
1, . . . , m into the space defined by Ti , pj = diag(xj ⊗ Ti ),
finding the label of K-nearest neighbors of pq in that space
and calculating the following similarity measure:

K
S(xq , OLB(xi , ωi , Ti )) = RC (j )fj (ωi ) (8)
j =1
fj (ωi ) in (8) is a binary value function that demonstrates
whether the class label of the j th neighbor of pq is ωi or
not (5). RC (j ) is the reward function defined in (4).
Based on (8), class  similarity measure is defined
by fusing the similarity measures of all the OLBs be-
longing to it, i.e. S(xq , OLB(xi , , Ti )). For fusing the
S(xq , OLB(xi , , Ti )) different methods can be utilized in-
cluding max, median, sum and product rule. In our exper-
iments sum rule as shown in (9) led to higher recognition
accuracies.

ni
S = S(xq , OLB(xi , , Ti )) (9)
i=1
where ni is the number of representative points in class i.
In order to classify a query input, we adopt a single stage
decision making strategy where the similarity measure for
all the classes are computed using (9) and the most similar
match is assigned as the output of the classifier.
At semantic level, reward and punishment terms in (4)
are comparable with within and between scatters or dis-
tances in a separability matrix or measure. In the classifi-
cation stage we want to calculate the similarity of query xq
to class ωi represented by OLB(xi , ωi , Ti ). Since the pun-
ishment shows similarity of xq to the other classes and sim-
ilarity of xq to ωj , j = i is considered when (8) is calcu-
lated for OLB(xj , ωj , Tj ), j = i, we do not incorporate the
punishments in (8), while an alternative version of (8) with
punishment term is still conceivable.
198
5 Computational Complexity
The computational complexity of the learning algorithm de-
pends on the order of MDP used for training. The computa-
tional complexity of the first order MDP is analyzed here as
this particular model is utilized in experiments of this paper.
Consider a first order MDP with N features. The OLB learn-
ing algorithm creates a Q1 table of size N × N . As every
cell of this table must be visited by the agent sufficiently, we
chose the number of episodes of the RL algorithm equal to
the number of cells of Q1 as N 2 . Since each episode maxi-
mally consists of N steps, the average number of visits per
cell is bounded by N . This ensures that every cells is visited
almost N times in average.
In each step of an episode, the agent finds a maximum
and updates appropriate cells. Therefore, the computational
complexity of a first order MDP is equal to the number of
episodes, O(N 2 ), multiplied by the number of steps, O(N ),
at most. This results in O(N 3 ) for each OLB. For higher
order MDPs, the computational cost is higher. To avoid
high computational cost, authors are currently working on
function approximation methods for estimation of Q-values.
This approach drastically decreases the computational cost
(Sutton and Barto 1998).
6 Experimental Results
We used AR (Martinez and Kak 2001), PIE (Sim et al.
2003), ORL (ORL database) and YALE (Yale University
Face Image Database) databases to evaluate the performance
of the proposed method in different face orientations, ex-
pressions, illumination situations and occlusions. In all ex-
periments, no preprocessing except downsampling was per-
formed on the images. In each experiment, the image set was
partitioned into training and testing sets. For ease of rep-
resentation, the experiments are named as Gm/P n which
means that m images per individual are randomly selected
for training and the remaining n images are used for testing.
The experiments are repeated ten times for every randomly
partitioned dataset.
In our method, Gm = 2 is the smallest possible num-
ber of training data per class. The reason is that the pro-
posed algorithm employs RL—which is a semi-supervised
method—and like other semi-supervised/supervised algo-
rithms needs more than one sample per class for learning.
The proposed method is benchmarked against the well-
known Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991), Fisherface
(Belhumeur et al. 1997) and two state of the art methods;
SDA (Manli and Martinez 2006) and random subspace LDA
(Wang and Tang 2006). In SDA, the leave one out version
was used. The number of subclasses in SDA—which is a
free parameter—was set to two, three and five (whenever
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
the gallery size permits) and the highest recognition rates
are reported. For random subspace LDA, Wang’s sugges-
tions for the number of subspaces and fixed dimensions are
adopted and the majority voting fusion rule was used (Wang
and Tang 2006). Again for random subspace LDA, the high-
est recognition rates are reported.
In OLB algorithm, most appropriate features were se-
lected by the adaptive thresholding method with k-means
clustering. In the learning process of the experiments, we
employed a k-NN classifiers with k = 3 whenever there
were more than two prototypes per individual in the train-
ing set. The reward signal were RC = [3 2 1.5] and PN C =
[−1 − 1 − 1] in these cases. For the cases where there
were only two prototypes per individual in the training set,
a k = 2 k-NN classifier was used with RC = [3 2] and
PN C = [−1 − 1].
In order to make a fair comparison with the SDA and ran-
dom subspace LDA, we trained the proposed method over
LDA space. The number of features passed to OLB algo-
rithm was C − 1, where C was the number of classes in each
database. Consequently the number of learning episodes was
chosen as C 2 .
The studied methods are compared in terms of the recog-
nition rate, its standard deviation and the number of features.
For every partition of train/test sets, we found the maximum
recognition rate of each benchmarking method over all of
its recognition-affecting parameters. The reported recogni-
tion rate for each method is the average of that maximum
accuracy. The recognition-affecting parameters are the num-
ber of features in Eigenface, the numbers of features and
sub-clusters in SDA, and the numbers of subspaces and ran-
domly selected Eigenfaces in addition to the number of the
preserved ones in the random subspace LDA. For methods in
those the number of features affects the recognition rate, the
recognition rate is checked for the top k features as k varies
from one to the maximum number of available features.
The reported numbers of features are the average of num-
ber of features associated to the above mentioned maximum
accuracy over ten runs of each train/test partition. The num-
ber of most appropriate features in the proposed method dif-
fers from one OLB to another. Therefore, the reported values
here are obtained by first averaging the number of most ap-
propriate features over all the OLBs and then averaging over
ten runs of each train/test partition. The number of features
for all cases was rounded to the nearest integer.
6.1 AR Database
The AR face database consists of frontal view images of
over 100 people. The subjects were photographed twice at
a 2-week interval. During each session 13 conditions with
varying facial expressions, illumination and occlusion were
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204 199

captured. Figure 5 shows an example of each condition. Ex-
periments on this database were carried out on the down-
sampled images of size 96 × 64. Sixty randomly selected
individuals of this database were used in our simulations.
A random subset with Gm(= 3, 7, 11) images per individ-
ual was taken to form the training set, and the rest of the
database was used for testing. The gallery images were se-
lected merely from the first imaging session.
The recognition accuracies, standard deviations and the
number of features are compared in Tables 3 and 4, respec-
tively. Table 3 reveals that the proposed algorithm outper-
forms the other studied methods in all cases. The difference
between the OLB and the other algorithms become more
significant when the number of gallery samples per individ-
ual is smaller. The improvements are obtained even by using
fewer features as shown in Table 4.
The performance of the random subspace LDA and OLB
algorithm were close for Gm(= 7, 11) samples per individ-
ual, however; the improvement that OLB has caused over
LDA is very significant. The proposed method can also be
used in each subspace derived by random subspace LDA.
Another interesting property of the obtained results on
AR dataset is that when the number of gallery samples per
individual is increased, the number of features in OLB al-
gorithm is decreased. This shows that when the number of
gallery samples is increased, the OLB agent extracts the lo-
cal basis with fewer features; this is of course the result of
OLB local representation characteristic.
6.2 PIE Database
The CMU PIE face database contains 68 individuals with
41368 face images. Examples of pose and illumination vari-
ation in this database are shown in Fig. 6. The near frontal
poses (C05, C07, C09, C27 and C29) were used in our ex-
periments which resulted in having 170 images per subject
under different illuminations and expressions. Experiments

Fig. 5 Images of one of the subjects in the AR database taken during one session

Table 3 Recognition rate and its standard deviation of the studied methods for AR database with different training set size

Method G3/P23 G7/P19 G11/P15

Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 63.66, σ = 7.1 74.7, σ = 5.1 77.15, σ = 2.8
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 75.75, σ = 5.6 86.0, σ = 1.1 87.70, σ = 3.0
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 75.18, σ = 5.3 83.79, σ = 3.3 87.13, σ = 1.5
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 77.72, σ = 6.4 89.74, σ = 1.9 91.04, σ = 0.8
Proposed method 82.47, σ = 5.2 90.33, σ = 1.8 92.07, σ = 0.7

Table 4 The number of

features employed by the Method G3/P23 G7/P19 G11/P15
studied methods for AR
database Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 163 372 359
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 59 59 59
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 67 72 119
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 20 × 59 20 × 59 20 × 59
Proposed method 28 16 13
200 Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204

Fig. 6 Example images of PIE database

Table 5 Recognition rate and its standard deviation of the studied methods for PIE database with different training set size

Method G3/P167 G7/P163 G11/P159

Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 23.85, σ = 4.0 37.08, σ = 2.5 46.98, σ = 5.9
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 49.94, σ = 7.6 62.14, σ = 7.9 67.98, σ = 6.7
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 46.75, σ = 8.8 62.42, σ = 5.4 72.12, σ = 7.7
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 52.70, σ = 8.4 69.08, σ = 10.2 78.58, σ = 3.7
Proposed method 55.55, σ = 7.6 71.07, σ = 8.2 80.56, σ = 4.4

Table 6 The number of

features employed by the Method G3/P167 G7/P163 G11/P159
studied methods for PIE
database Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 123 446 460
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 67 67 67
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 58 54 43
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 20 × 67 40 × 67 40 × 67
Proposed method 37 23 32

Fig. 7 Example images of ORL database

on this database were carried out on the cropped and down-
sampled images of size 119 × 98. Similar to the previous ex-
periment, a random subset with Gm(= 3, 7, 11) images per
individual was taken to form the training set, and the rest
of the images formed the testing set. The recognition accu-
racies, standard deviations and the number of features are
compared in Tables 5 and 6, respectively. Table 5 demon-
strates that the proposed approach performs better than the
other studied methods. In addition, the improvement that
OLB has caused over LDA is very significant.
6.3 ORL Database
ORL face database (developed at the Olivetti Research Lab-
oratory, Cambridge, UK) is composed of 400 images with
ten different images for each of the 40 distinct subjects. The
variations of the images are across pose, size, time, and fa-
cial expressions. Some of the images of this database are
shown in Fig. 7. Experiments on this database were carried
out on the original images of size 112 × 92. For ORL data-
base, a random subset with Gm(= 2, 3, 5) images per in-
dividual was taken to form the training set, and the rest of
the database was used as the testing set. The recognition ac-
curacies, standard deviations along with the number of fea-
tures are compared in Tables 7 and 8, respectively. Similar
to previous experiments, it can be observed that the OLB al-
gorithm is performing better than the other studied methods
with fewer features. For small number of samples per indi-
vidual, the difference between the OLB algorithm and the
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204 201
Table 7 Recognition rate and its standard deviation of the studied methods for ORL database with different training set size

Method G2/P8 G3/P7 G5/P5

Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 80.08, σ = 2.6 88.43, σ = 4.3 96.1, σ = 1.3
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 73.06, σ = 3.9 85.61, σ = 2.6 93.6, σ = 0.9
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 74.42, σ = 4.9 87.32, σ = 3.8 93.8, σ = 1.1
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 78.36, σ = 3.5 88.95, σ = 2.6 96.1, σ = 0.8
Proposed method 83.81, σ = 3.2 91.86, σ = 2.6 97.7, σ = 0.6

Table 8 The number of

features employed by the Method G2/P8 G3/P7 G5/P5
studied methods for ORL
Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 73 63 59
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 39 39 39
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 53 57 78
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 5 × 39 5 × 39 5 × 39
Proposed method 13 10 7

Fig. 8 Example images of YALE database

Table 9 Recognition rate and its standard deviation of the studied methods for YALE database with different training set size

Method G2/P9 G3/P8 G5/P6

Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 51.4, σ = 4.5 58.25, σ = 2.7 61.11, σ = 5.7
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 46.37, σ = 3.7 63.58%, σ = 5.2 70.67, σ = 8.3
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 58.52, σ = 2.5 66.08, σ = 3.2 72.44, σ = 6.7
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 55.38, σ = 7.8 70.83, σ = 5.2 72.66, σ = 5.7
Proposed method 59.56, σ = 4.7 74.08, σ = 4.6 76.75, σ = 5.2

other algorithms is more significant. As in AR database, the
number of features in OLB is proportional to the inverse size
of the training samples per class.
6.4 YALE Database
Yale face database contains 165 images with 11 different im-
ages for each of the 15 distinct subjects. The 11 images per
subject are taken under different facial expression or config-
uration: center-light, with glasses, happy, left-light, without
glasses, normal, right-light, sad, sleepy, surprised, and wink.
Some of the images of this database are shown in Fig. 8.
Experiments on this database were carried out on the down-
sampled images of size 32×32. For Yale database, a random
subset with Gm(= 2, 3, 5) images per individual was taken
to form the training set and the rest of the database were used
for testing. The recognition accuracies, standard deviations
along with the number of features are compared in Tables 9
and 10, respectively. Like the previous experiments, the pro-
posed algorithm outperforms the other studied methods with
fewer features.
7 Further Discussions
In Sect. 6, we reported the performance of the proposed
method on different databases. Now, we take a closer look
at the properties of our proposed algorithm. Firstly the effect
of different face spaces is studied.
202 Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
Table 10 The number of
features employed by the Method G2/P9 G3/P8 G5/P6
studied methods for YALE
database Eigenface (Turk and Pentland 1991) 27 40 29
Fisherface (Belhumeur et al. 1997) 14 14 14
SDA on Eigenface (Manli and Martinez 2006) 14 26 23
Random subspace LDA (Wang and Tang 2006) 5 × 14 5 × 14 5 × 14
Proposed method 9 9 8

The OLB algorithm was trained on PIE database with

two different face spaces; Eigenface and Fisherface. In this
experiment, three images per individual were used as the
gallery data. A sample plot of the Q-values vs. PCA/LDA
feature numbers for the first 65 features for one of the gallery
samples is shown in Fig. 9. Examining these plots reveals the
following points:
• The directions corresponding to higher eigenvalues are
not usually the first and the best choice for discrimination.
For example the second and third directions in the upper
plot of Fig. 9 (PCA space) have negative values. This im-
plies that by selecting these features, the OLB agent has
received punishment, i.e. the agent has not successfully
discriminated its class from the other classes.
• Based on the Q-values demonstrated in the Fig. 9(b), it
can be seen that the LDA space is much more discrimina- (a)
tive for this sample of gallery. This observation suggests
that one can define a feature pool with different clusters
(like LDA cluster and PCA cluster). The OLB agent must
first decide which cluster is more appropriate for each
sample and then derive the optimal features based on the
selected cluster.
Another interesting observation is to study the order of
features in Eigenface space. We trained the OLB algorithm
over the first fifty directions of the space defined by PCA
for ORL database where three images per individual were
used for training. In this case, the Eigenface method reached
its best accuracy around 50 features. As a result, we did
not train the OLB algorithm for all the Eigenface space. In
Fig. 10 a contour map of the Q-values vs. feature number
for this experiment is shown. Each row of this figure corre-
sponds to a training image. The brighter regions of this plot
mean that the agent has received greater rewards by select- (b)
ing the corresponding features. Looking globally, the fea-
Fig. 9 Q-values vs. feature number for a gallery sample of PIE data-
tures correspond to larger eigenvalues are usually more im- base trained over (a) PCA space, (b) LDA space
portant than those correspond to smaller eigenvalues. This
observation is supported by random subspace LDA method
where the directions corresponding to higher eigenvalues are fect of this parameter, a sample experiment was performed
kept intact. However, the existence of samples with brighter by selecting thirteen images of the first session of the AR
regions seen for lower eigenvalues supports our idea to de- database as training data and all thirteen images of the sec-
velop OLB. ond session as the testing set and trained the OLB algorithm
Finally it is good to study the effect of choosing differ- with k(= 2, 3, 4, . . . , 12) k-NN classifiers. The recognition
ent k-NN in the training phase. In order to study the ef- accuracy vs. parameter k is shown in Fig. 11. It is evident
Int J Comput Vis (2009) 81: 191–204
Fig. 10 Q-values vs. feature number for all the training images of
ORL images where three images per individual is used as gallery. The
face space is derived by Eigenface method. Brighter regions corre-
spond to higher Q-values. Note that for some images the agent did
not receive high rewards
Fig. 11 Maximum recognition accuracy for different k-NN classifiers
when the thirteen images of the first session of AR database are used
for training
that when the number of samples per class is small, the de-
signer has to choose a small k too. Interestingly, this figure
reveals that it is possible to get higher recognition accuracy
by selecting a small k even when the number of samples per
class is large. The reason for this observation is because, by
choosing a large k, the OLB agent is forced to derive the
best discriminant features for each representative point as
global as possible. It contradicts OLB’s local nature and it
may result in reducing its generalization ability.
203
8 Conclusion
In this paper, we introduced an object called Optimal Local
Basis (OLB) as a tool for face recognition. Each OLB was
characterized by a representative point in feature space, a
class label, and a set of locally optimal features. The locally
optimal features were derived from a larger set of features by
using a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach. The rein-
forcement signal was designed to be correlated to the recog-
nition accuracy. For each representative point, the maximum
reward was obtained when those data with the same class la-
bel got closer to it in a Euclidean space.
In general, finding discriminant local bases can be mod-
eled as an optimization problem. There is a variety of meth-
ods for modeling and solving such optimization problems;
like evolutionary methods, dynamic programming, RL, etc.
The key differences of those methods are in the complex-
ity of the model and the optimization cost, along with the
challenges in defining the cost (fitness) function. By assum-
ing the learning task as a Markov Decision Process (MDP),
we reduced the search space considerably. Since the MDP
model is not fully known, we solved the optimization prob-
lem by using RL; which benefits from bootstrapping and
Monte-Carlo estimation of optimal values. In addition, by
using RL, defining a fitness function becomes simpler and
more flexible, as we just need local and very simple and dis-
crete reward and punishment signals. We also exploited the
reinforcement signal to construct a new non-metric classi-
fier. In our approach to classification, by utilizing the rein-
forcement signal, we do not need to define and tune a dis-
tance measure for each OLB.
The OLB method perfectly suits the face recognition
dilemma and problems with high dimensional feature space
and small number of training samples. The performance of
the proposed learning algorithm was examined on the face
recognition problem in different databases and with differ-
ent number of training images where LDA transform was
used to extract the face features. Nevertheless the proposed
method is theoretically independent from the type of feature
space.
Our proposed method can be compared with “person-
specific” methods, where a set of exclusive features is ex-
tracted for each individual. Basically we can call the OLBs
“person-specific”, since each OLB is derived to represent an
individual. However, the features associated to each OLB
are the most discriminant subset of features in a neighbor-
hood of its representative point and each person may have
several OLBs due to the complexity of face manifold. That
means OLBs are local in addition to being person-specific.
We are working on an incremental version of our learning
algorithm, which enables the OLB method to easily adapt
to the changes cause by adding new classes to the data-
base. Pattern classification can be grouped into close-set and
204
open-set applications. In practice, the open-set classifica-
tion is a more challenging problem. The incremental version
of the proposed learning algorithm can tackle the open-set
identification problem as well. In addition, as the proposed
method extracts the most discriminant features for each pro-
totype in the training database, it could also be a suitable
candidate for face verification task. We plan to investigate
the appropriateness of our proposed algorithm for this task
in near future.
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