The most discriminant subbands for face recognition: A novel information-theoretic framework

In this paper, we propose a consolidated framework for the automatic selection of the most discriminant subbands for the problem of face recognition. Essentially, the face images are transformed into textures using the linear binary pattern (LBP) approach, these texturized-faces undergo the wavelet packet decomposition resulting in several subband images. We propose to use the energy features to effectively represent these subband images. The underlying statistical patterns of the data are harnessed in form of information-theoretic metrics to select the most discriminant subbands. The proposed algorithms are extensively evaluated on several standard databases and are shown to always pick the most significant subbands resulting in better performance. The proposed algorithms are entirely generic and do not depend on the selection of features or/and classifiers.