Abstract Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and partial least squares (PLS) are well-known techniques for feature extraction from two sets of multidimensional variables. The fundamental difference between CCA and PLS is that CCA maximizes the correlation while PLS maximizes the covariance. Although both CCA and PLS have been applied successfully in various applications, the intrinsic relationship between them remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by showing the equivalence relationship between CCA and orthonormalized partial least squares (OPLS), a variant of PLS. We further extend the equivalence relationship to the case when regularization is employed for both sets of variables. In addition, we show that the CCA projection for one set of variables is independent of the regularization on the other set of variables. We have performed experimental studies using both synthetic and real data sets and our results confifirm the established equivalence relationship. The presented analysis provides novel insights into the connection between these two existing algorithms as well as the effect of the regularization