Faces recognition example using eigenfaces and SVMs

The dataset used in this example is a preprocessed excerpt of the “Labeled Faces in the Wild”, aka LFW:

from time import time

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.stats import loguniform

from sklearn.datasets import fetch_lfw_people
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA
from sklearn.metrics import ConfusionMatrixDisplay, classification_report
from sklearn.model_selection import RandomizedSearchCV, train_test_split
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.svm import SVC

Download the data, if not already on disk and load it as numpy arrays

lfw_people = fetch_lfw_people(min_faces_per_person=70, resize=0.4)

# introspect the images arrays to find the shapes (for plotting)
n_samples, h, w = lfw_people.images.shape

# for machine learning we use the 2 data directly (as relative pixel
# positions info is ignored by this model)
X = lfw_people.data
n_features = X.shape[1]

# the label to predict is the id of the person
y = lfw_people.target
target_names = lfw_people.target_names
n_classes = target_names.shape[0]

print("Total dataset size:")
print("n_samples: %d" % n_samples)
print("n_features: %d" % n_features)
print("n_classes: %d" % n_classes)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/build/scikit-learn-PlxsQC/scikit-learn-1.4.2+dfsg/examples/applications/plot_face_recognition.py", line 30, in <module>
    lfw_people = fetch_lfw_people(min_faces_per_person=70, resize=0.4)
  File "/build/scikit-learn-PlxsQC/scikit-learn-1.4.2+dfsg/.pybuild/cpython3_3.13/build/sklearn/utils/_param_validation.py", line 213, in wrapper
    return func(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/build/scikit-learn-PlxsQC/scikit-learn-1.4.2+dfsg/.pybuild/cpython3_3.13/build/sklearn/datasets/_lfw.py", line 342, in fetch_lfw_people
    lfw_home, data_folder_path = _check_fetch_lfw(
                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
        data_home=data_home, funneled=funneled, download_if_missing=download_if_missing
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    )
    ^
  File "/build/scikit-learn-PlxsQC/scikit-learn-1.4.2+dfsg/.pybuild/cpython3_3.13/build/sklearn/datasets/_lfw.py", line 89, in _check_fetch_lfw
    _fetch_remote(target, dirname=lfw_home)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/build/scikit-learn-PlxsQC/scikit-learn-1.4.2+dfsg/.pybuild/cpython3_3.13/build/sklearn/datasets/_base.py", line 1432, in _fetch_remote
    raise IOError('Debian Policy Section 4.9 prohibits network access during build')
OSError: Debian Policy Section 4.9 prohibits network access during build

Split into a training set and a test and keep 25% of the data for testing.

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(
    X, y, test_size=0.25, random_state=42
)

scaler = StandardScaler()
X_train = scaler.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test = scaler.transform(X_test)

Compute a PCA (eigenfaces) on the face dataset (treated as unlabeled dataset): unsupervised feature extraction / dimensionality reduction

n_components = 150

print(
    "Extracting the top %d eigenfaces from %d faces" % (n_components, X_train.shape[0])
)
t0 = time()
pca = PCA(n_components=n_components, svd_solver="randomized", whiten=True).fit(X_train)
print("done in %0.3fs" % (time() - t0))

eigenfaces = pca.components_.reshape((n_components, h, w))

print("Projecting the input data on the eigenfaces orthonormal basis")
t0 = time()
X_train_pca = pca.transform(X_train)
X_test_pca = pca.transform(X_test)
print("done in %0.3fs" % (time() - t0))

Train a SVM classification model

print("Fitting the classifier to the training set")
t0 = time()
param_grid = {
    "C": loguniform(1e3, 1e5),
    "gamma": loguniform(1e-4, 1e-1),
}
clf = RandomizedSearchCV(
    SVC(kernel="rbf", class_weight="balanced"), param_grid, n_iter=10
)
clf = clf.fit(X_train_pca, y_train)
print("done in %0.3fs" % (time() - t0))
print("Best estimator found by grid search:")
print(clf.best_estimator_)

Quantitative evaluation of the model quality on the test set

print("Predicting people's names on the test set")
t0 = time()
y_pred = clf.predict(X_test_pca)
print("done in %0.3fs" % (time() - t0))

print(classification_report(y_test, y_pred, target_names=target_names))
ConfusionMatrixDisplay.from_estimator(
    clf, X_test_pca, y_test, display_labels=target_names, xticks_rotation="vertical"
)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Qualitative evaluation of the predictions using matplotlib

def plot_gallery(images, titles, h, w, n_row=3, n_col=4):
    """Helper function to plot a gallery of portraits"""
    plt.figure(figsize=(1.8 * n_col, 2.4 * n_row))
    plt.subplots_adjust(bottom=0, left=0.01, right=0.99, top=0.90, hspace=0.35)
    for i in range(n_row * n_col):
        plt.subplot(n_row, n_col, i + 1)
        plt.imshow(images[i].reshape((h, w)), cmap=plt.cm.gray)
        plt.title(titles[i], size=12)
        plt.xticks(())
        plt.yticks(())

plot the result of the prediction on a portion of the test set

def title(y_pred, y_test, target_names, i):
    pred_name = target_names[y_pred[i]].rsplit(" ", 1)[-1]
    true_name = target_names[y_test[i]].rsplit(" ", 1)[-1]
    return "predicted: %s\ntrue:      %s" % (pred_name, true_name)


prediction_titles = [
    title(y_pred, y_test, target_names, i) for i in range(y_pred.shape[0])
]

plot_gallery(X_test, prediction_titles, h, w)

plot the gallery of the most significative eigenfaces

eigenface_titles = ["eigenface %d" % i for i in range(eigenfaces.shape[0])]
plot_gallery(eigenfaces, eigenface_titles, h, w)

plt.show()

Face recognition problem would be much more effectively solved by training convolutional neural networks but this family of models is outside of the scope of the scikit-learn library. Interested readers should instead try to use pytorch or tensorflow to implement such models.

Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 0.002 seconds)

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