Face Verification via learning the kernel matrix

The kernel function is introduced to solve the nonlinear pattern recognition problem. The advantage of a kernel method often depends critically on a proper choice of the kernel function. A promising approach is to learn the kernel from data automatically. Over the past few years, some methods which have been proposed to learn the kernel have some limitations: learning the parameters of some prespecified kernel function and so on. In this paper, the nonlinear face verification via learning the kernel matrix is proposed. A new criterion is used in the new algorithm to avoid inverting the possibly singular within-class which is a computational problem. The experimental results obtained on the facial database XM2VTS using the Lausanne protocol show that the verification performance of the new method is superior to that of the primary method Client Specific Kernel Discriminant Analysis (CSKDA). The method CSKDA needs to choose a proper kernel function through many experiments, while the new method could learn the kernel from data automatically which could save a lot of time and have the robust performance.