Ha-Young Kim  Hee-Jae Lee  Sang-Goog Lee

Face Recognition Illumination Variation face representation Histogram Equalization

Facial appearance is greatly influenced by illumination conditions, and therefore illumination variation is one of the factors that degrades performance of face recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a robust method for face representation under varying illumination conditions, combining non-alpha Weberface (non-alpha WF) and histogram equalization. We propose a two-step method: (1) for a given face image, non-alpha WF, which is not applied a parameter for adjusting the intensity difference between neighboring pixels in WF, is computed; (2) histogram equalization is performed to non-alpha WF, to make a uniform histogram distribution globally and to enhance the contrast. (2D)²PCA is applied to extract low-dimensional discriminating features from the preprocessed face image. Experimental results on the extended Yale B face database and the CMU PIE face database show that the proposed method yielded better recognition rates than several illumination processing methods as well as the conventional WF, achieving average recognition rates of 93.31% and 97.25%, respectively.