Integrating Sparse and Collaborative Representation Classifications for Image Classification

Collaborative representation classification (CRC) is an important sparse method, which is easy to carry out and uses a linear combination of training samples to represent a test sample. CRC method utilizes the offset between representation result of each class and the test sample to implement classification. However, the offset usually cannot well express the difference between every class and the test sample. In this paper, we propose a novel representation method for image recognition to address the above problem. This method not only fuses sparse representation and CRC method to improve the accuracy of image recognition, but also has novel fusion mechanism to classify images. The implementations of the proposed method have the following steps. First of all, it produces collaborative representation of the test sample. That is, a linear combination of all the training samples is first determined to represent the test sample. Then, it gets the sparse representation classification (SRC) of the test sample. Finally, the proposed method respectively uses CRC and SRC representations to obtain two kinds of scores of the test sample and fuses them to recognize the image. The experiments of face recognition show that the combination of CRC and SRC has satisfactory performance for image classification.