Antoine Guillot explains some of the basic concepts of variable reduction in a data analysis:
Each of these people can be represented as points in a 3 Dimensional space. With a gross approximation, each people is in a 50*50*200 (cm) cube. If we use a resolution of 1cm and three color channels, then can be represented by 1,000,000 variables.
On the other hand, the shadow is only in 2 dimensions and in black and white, so each shadow only needs 50*200=10,000 variables.
The number of variables was divided by 100 ! And if your goal is to detect human vs cat, or even men vs women, the data from the shadow may be enough.
Read on for intuitive discussions of techniques like principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis. H/T R-Bloggers