  We consider the image classification problem via kernel collaborative
representation classification with locality constrained dictionary (KCRC-LCD).
Specifically, we propose a kernel collaborative representation classification
(KCRC) approach in which kernel method is used to improve the discrimination
ability of collaborative representation classification (CRC). We then measure
the similarities between the query and atoms in the global dictionary in order
to construct a locality constrained dictionary (LCD) for KCRC. In addition, we
discuss several similarity measure approaches in LCD and further present a
simple yet effective unified similarity measure whose superiority is validated
in experiments. There are several appealing aspects associated with LCD. First,
LCD can be nicely incorporated under the framework of KCRC. The LCD similarity
measure can be kernelized under KCRC, which theoretically links CRC and LCD
under the kernel method. Second, KCRC-LCD becomes more scalable to both the
training set size and the feature dimension. Example shows that KCRC is able to
perfectly classify data with certain distribution, while conventional CRC fails
completely. Comprehensive experiments on many public datasets also show that
KCRC-LCD is a robust discriminative classifier with both excellent performance
and good scalability, being comparable or outperforming many other
state-of-the-art approaches.
