Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is one of the most effective feature extraction methods in statistical pattern recognition, which extracts the discriminant features by maximizing the so-called Fisher’s criterion that is defined as the ratio of between-class scatter matrix to within-class scatter matrix. However, classification of high-dimensional statistical data is usually not amenable to standard pattern recognition techniques because of an underlying small sample size (SSS) problem. A popular approach to the SSS problem is the removal of non-informative features via subspace-based decomposition techniques. Motivated by this viewpoint, many elaborate subspace decomposition methods including Fisherface, direct LDA (D-LDA), complete PCA plus LDA (C-LDA), random discriminant analysis (RDA) and multilinear discriminant analysis (MDA), etc., have been developed, especially in the context of face recognition. Nevertheless, how to search a set of complete optimal subspaces for discriminant analysis is still a hot topic of research in area of LDA. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminant criterion, called optimal symmetrical null space (OSNS) criterion that can be used to compute the Fisher’s maximal discriminant criterion combined with the minimal one. Meanwhile, by the reformed criterion, the complete symmetrical subspaces based on the within-class and between-class scatter matrices are constructed, respectively. Different from the traditional subspace learning criterion that derives only one principal subspace, in our approach two null subspaces and their orthogonal complements were all obtained through the optimization of OSNS criterion. Therefore, the algorithm based on OSNS has the potential to outperform the traditional LDA algorithms, especially in the cases of small sample size. Experimental results conducted on the ORL, FERET, XM2VTS and NUST603 face image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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