We present a dictionary learning approach to compensate for the transformation of faces due to the changes in view point, illumination, resolution, and so on. The key idea of our approach is to force domain-invariant sparse coding, i.e., designing a consistent sparse representation of the same face in different domains. In this way, the classifiers trained on the sparse codes in the source domain consisting of frontal faces can be applied to the target domain (consisting of faces in different poses, illumination conditions, and so on) without much loss in recognition accuracy. The approach is to first learn a domain base dictionary, and then describe each domain shift (identity, pose, and illumination) using a sparse representation over the base dictionary. The dictionary adapted to each domain is expressed as the sparse linear combinations of the base dictionary. In the context of face recognition, with the proposed compositional dictionary approach, a face image can be decomposed into sparse representations for a given subject, pose, and illumination. This approach has three advantages. First, the extracted sparse representation for a subject is consistent across domains, and enables pose and illumination insensitive face recognition. Second, sparse representations for pose and illumination can be subsequently used to estimate the pose and illumination condition of a face image. Last, by composing sparse representations for the subject and the different domains, we can also perform pose alignment and illumination normalization. Extensive experiments using two public face data sets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for face recognition.

We present a two-stage approach for learning dictionaries for object classification tasks based on the principle of information maximization. The proposed method seeks a dictionary that is compact, discriminative, and generative. In the first stage, dictionary atoms are selected from an initial dictionary by maximizing the mutual information measure on dictionary compactness, discrimination and reconstruction. In the second stage, the selected dictionary atoms are updated for improved reconstructive and discriminative power using a simple gradient ascent algorithm on mutual information. Experiments using real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for image classification tasks.

Although facial expressions can be decomposed in terms of action units (AUs) as suggested by the facial action coding system, there have been only a few attempts that recognize expression using AUs and their composition rules. In this paper, we propose a dictionary-based approach for facial expression analysis by decomposing expressions in terms of AUs. First, we construct an AU-dictionary using domain experts' knowledge of AUs. To incorporate the high-level knowledge regarding expression decomposition and AUs, we then perform structure-preserving sparse coding by imposing two layers of grouping over AU-dictionary atoms as well as over the test image matrix columns. We use the computed sparse code matrix for each expressive face to perform expression decomposition and recognition. Since domain experts' knowledge may not always be available for constructing an AU-dictionary, we also propose a structure-preserving dictionary learning algorithm, which we use to learn a structured dictionary as well as divide expressive faces into several semantic regions. Experimental results on publicly available expression data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for facial expression analysis.

Domain adaptation addresses the problem where data instances of a source domain have different distributions from that of a target domain, which occurs frequently in many real life scenarios. This work focuses on unsupervised domain adaptation, where labeled data are only available in the source domain. We propose to interpolate subspaces through dictionary learning to link the source and target domains. These subspaces are able to capture the intrinsic domain shift and form a shared feature representation for cross domain recognition. Further, we introduce a quantitative measure to characterize the shift between two domains, which enables us to select the optimal domain to adapt to the given multiple source domains. We present experiments on face recognition across pose, illumination and blur variations, cross dataset object recognition, and report improved performance over the state of the art.

We present an approach for dictionary learning of action attributes via information maximization. We unify the class distribution and appearance information into an objective function for learning a sparse dictionary of action attributes. The objective function maximizes the mutual information between what has been learned and what remains to be learned in terms of appearance information and class distribution for each dictionary item. We propose a Gaussian Process (GP) model for sparse representation to optimize the dictionary objective function. The sparse coding property allows a kernel with a compact support in GP to realize a very efficient dictionary learning process. Hence we can describe an action video by a set of compact and discriminative action attributes. More importantly, we can recognize modeled action categories in a sparse feature space, which can be generalized to unseen and unmodeled action categories. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in action recognition applications.