Automatic face photo-sketch image retrieval has attracted great attention in recent years due to its important applications in real life. The major difficulty in automatic face photo-sketch image retrieval lies in the fact that there exists great discrepancy between the different image modalities (photo and sketch). In order to reduce such discrepancy and improve the performance of automatic face photo-sketch image retrieval, we propose a new framework called multi-feature canonical correlation

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... analysis (MCCA) to effectively address this problem. The MCCA is an extension and improvement of the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) algorithm using multiple features combined with two different random sampling methods in feature space and sample space. In this framework, we first represent each photo or sketch using a patch-based local feature representation scheme, in which histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and multi-scale local binary pattern (MLBP) serve as the local descriptors. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is then performed on a collection of random subspaces to construct an ensemble of classifiers for photo-sketch image retrieval. Extensive experiments on two public-domain face photo-sketch datasets (CUFS and CUFSF) clearly show that the proposed approach obtains a substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art.