Abstract
Natural images are the composite consequence of multiple factors related to scene structure, illumination, and imaging. For facial images, the factors include different facial geometries, expressions, head poses, and lighting conditions. We apply multilinear algebra, the algebra of higher-order tensors, to obtain a parsimonious representation of facial image ensembles which separates these factors. Our representation, called TensorFaces, yields improved facial recognition rates relative to standard eigenfaces.