Projected gradients for subclass discriminant nonnegative subspace learning

Current discriminant nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) methods either do not guarantee convergence to a stationary limit point or assume a compact data distribution inside classes, thus ignoring intra class variance in extracting discriminant data samples representations. To address both limitations, we regard that data inside each class has a multimodal distribution, forming various subclasses and perform optimization using a projected gradients framework to ensure limit point stationarity. The proposed method combines appropriate clustering-based discriminant criteria in the NMF decomposition cost function, in order to find discriminant projections that enhance class separability in the reduced dimensional projection space, thus improving classification performance. The developed algorithms have been applied to facial expression, face and object recognition, and experimental results verified that they successfully identified discriminant parts, thus enhancing recognition performance.