A direct linear discriminant analysis algorithm based on economic singular value decomposition （DLDA/ESVD） is proposed to address the computationally complex problem of the conventional DLDA algorithm, which directly uses ESVD to reduce dimension and extract eigenvectors corresponding to nonzero eigenvalues. Then a DLDA algorithm based on column pivoting orthogonal triangular （QR） decomposition and ESVD （DLDA/QR-ESVD） is proposed to improve the performance of the DLDA/ESVD algorithm by processing a high-dimensional low rank matrix, which uses column pivoting QR decomposition to reduce dimension and ESVD to extract eigenvectors corresponding to nonzero eigenvalues. The experimental results on ORL, FERET and YALE face databases show that the proposed two algorithms can achieve almost the same performance and outperform the conventional DLDA algorithm in terms of computational complexity and training time. In addition, the experimental results on random data matrices show that the DLDA/QR-ESVD algorithm achieves better performance than the DLDA/ESVD algorithm by processing high-dimensional low rank matrices.
