Learning a perceptual manifold for image set classification

We present a biologically motivated manifold learning framework for image set classification inspired by Independent Component Analysis for Grassmann manifolds. A Grassmann manifold is a collection of linear subspaces, such that each subspace is mapped on a single point on the manifold. We propose constructing Grassmann subspaces using Independent Component Analysis for robustness and improved class separation. The independent components capture spatially local information similar to Gabor-like filters within each subspace resulting in better classification accuracy. We further utilize linear discriminant analysis or sparse representation classification on the Grassmann manifold to achieve robust classification performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for image set classification on face and object recognition datasets.