Self-training-based face recognition using semi-supervised linear discriminant analysis and affinity propagation.

Face recognition is one of the most important applications of machine learning and computer vision. The traditional supervised learning methods require a large amount of labeled face images to achieve good performance. In practice, however, labeled images are usually scarce while unlabeled ones may be abundant. In this paper, we introduce a semi-supervised face recognition method, in which semi-supervised linear discriminant analysis (SDA) and affinity propagation (AP) are integrated into a self-training framework. In particular, SDA is employed to compute the face subspace using both labeled and unlabeled images, and AP is used to identify the exemplars of different face classes in the subspace. The unlabeled data can then be classified according to the exemplars and the newly labeled data with the highest confidence are added to the labeled data, and the whole procedure iterates until convergence. A series of experiments on four face datasets are carried out to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Experimental results illustrate that our algorithm outperforms the other unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised methods.