This paper discusses a new type of discriminant analysis based on the orthogonal projection of data onto a generalized difference subspace (GDS). In our previous work, we have demonstrated that GDS projection works as the quasi-orthogonalization of class subspaces, which is an effective feature extraction for subspace based classifiers. Interestingly, GDS projection also works as a discriminant feature extraction through a similar mechanism to the Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA). A direct proof of the connection between GDS projection and FDA is difficult due to the significant difference in their formulations. To avoid the difficulty, we first introduce geometrical Fisher discriminant analysis (gFDA) based on a simplified Fisher criterion. Our simplified Fisher criterion is derived from a heuristic yet practically plausible principle: the direction of the sample mean vector of a class is in most cases almost equal to that of the first principal component vector of the class, under the condition that the principal component vectors are calculated by applying the principal component analysis (PCA) without data centering. gFDA can work stably even under few samples, bypassing the small sample size (SSS) problem of FDA. Next, we prove that gFDA is equivalent to GDS projection with a small correction term. This equivalence ensures GDS projection to inherit the discriminant ability from FDA via gFDA. Furthermore, to enhance the performances of gFDA and GDS projection, we normalize the projected vectors on the discriminant spaces. Extensive experiments using the extended Yale B+ database and the CMU face database show that gFDA and GDS projection have equivalent or better performance than the original FDA and its extensions.

The increasing use of multiple sensors requires more efficient methods to represent and classify multi-dimensional data, since these applications produce a large amount of data, demanding modern techniques for data processing. Considering these observations, we present in this paper a new method for multi-dimensional data classification which relies on two premises: 1) multi-dimensional data are usually represented by tensors, due to benefits from multilinear algebra and the established tensor factorization methods; and 2) this kind of data can be described by a subspace lying within a vector space. Subspace representation has been consistently employed for pattern-set recognition, and its tensor representation counterpart is also available in the literature. However, traditional methods do not employ discriminative information of the tensors, which degrades the classification accuracy. In this scenario, generalized difference subspace (GDS) may provide an enhanced subspace representation by reducing data redundancy and revealing discriminative structures. Since GDS is not able to directly handle tensor data, we propose a new projection called n-mode GDS, which efficiently handles tensor data. In addition, n-mode Fisher score is introduced as a class separability index and an improved metric based on the geodesic distance is provided to measure the similarity between tensor data. To confirm the advantages of the proposed method, we address the problem of representing and classifying tensor data for gesture and action recognition. The experimental results have shown that the proposed approach outperforms methods commonly used in the literature without adopting pre-trained models or transfer learning.