In this paper, we propose a non-negative representation based discriminative dictionary learning algorithm (NRDL) for multicategory face classification. In contrast to traditional dictionary learning methods, NRDL investigates the use of non-negative representation (NR), which contributes to learning discriminative dictionary atoms. In order to make the learned dictionary more suitable for classification, NRDL seamlessly incorporates nonnegative representation constraint, discriminative dictionary learning and linear classifier training into a unified model. Specifically, NRDL introduces a positive constraint on representation matrix to find distinct atoms from heterogeneous training samples, which results in sparse and discriminative representation. Moreover, a discriminative dictionary encouraging function is proposed to enhance the uniqueness of class-specific sub-dictionaries. Meanwhile, an inter-class incoherence constraint and a compact graph based regularization term are constructed to respectively improve the discriminability of learned classifier. Experimental results on several benchmark face data sets verify the advantages of our NRDL algorithm over the state-of-the-art dictionary learning methods.
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