The idea is that a training image can be decomposed into the weighted sum of multiple eigenfaces, and

all the weights stored as a sequence. Not all eigenfaces are equally important

some will contain more important facial elements for distinguishing between images. This means that it
is not usually necessary to use all the generated eigenfaces to recognize a face. This allows an image to
be represented by a smaller weights sequence (e.g. using only three weights instead of six in Figure 4).
The downside is that less weights means that less important facial elements will not be considered
during the recognition process. Another way of understanding the relationship between eigenfaces and
images is that each image is positioned in a multi-dimensional

eigenspace

, whose axes are the eigenfaces (see Figure 5