Face recognition under varying illumination based on a 2D face shape model

This paper proposes a novel illumination compensation algorithm, which can compensate for the uneven illuminations on human faces and reconstruct face images in normal lighting conditions. A simple yet effective local contrast enhancement method, namely block-based histogram equalization (BHE), is first proposed. The resulting image processed using BHE is then compared with the original face image processed using histogram equalization (HE) to estimate the category of its light source. In our scheme, we divide the light source for a human face into 65 categories. Based on the category identified, a corresponding lighting compensation model is used to reconstruct an image that will visually be under normal illumination. In order to eliminate the influence of uneven illumination while retaining the shape information about a human face, a 2D face shape model is used. Experimental results show that, with the use of principal component analysis for face recognition, the recognition rate can be improved by 53.3% to 62.6% when our proposed algorithm for lighting compensation is used.     

Homomorphic filtering based illumination normalization method for face recognition

The appearance of a face image is severely affected by illumination conditions that will hinder the automatic face recognition process. To recognize faces under varying lighting conditions, a homomorphic filtering-based illumination normalization method is proposed in this paper. In this work, the effect of illumination is effectively reduced by a modified implementation of homomorphic filtering whose key component is a Difference of Gaussian (DoG) filter, and the contrast is enhanced by histogram equalization. The resulted face image is not only reduced illumination effect but also preserved edges and details that will facilitate the further face recognition task. Among others, our method has the following advantages: (1) neither does it need any prior information of 3D shape or light sources, nor many training samples thus can be directly applied to single training image per person condition; and (2) it is simple and computationally fast because there are mature and fast algorithms for the Fourier transform used in homomorphic filter. The Eigenfaces method is chosen to recognize the normalized face images. Experimental results on the Yale face database B and the CMU PIE face database demonstrate the significant performance improvement of the proposed method in the face recognition system for the face images with large illumination variations.     

Face recognition under varying illumination using Mahalanobis self-organizing map

We present an appearance-based method for face recognition and evaluate its robustness against illumination changes. Self-organizing map (SOM) is utilized to transform the high dimensional face image into low dimensional topological space. However, the original learning algorithm of SOM uses Euclidean distance to measure similarity between input and codebook images, which is very sensitive to illumination changes. In this paper, we present Mahalanobis SOM, which uses Mahalanobis distance instead of the original Euclidean distance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by conducting some experiments on Yale B and CMU-PIE face databases. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008     

Rough membership function based illumination classifier for illumination invariant face recognition

This paper proposes a face recognition system to overcome the problem due to illumination variation. The propose system first classifies the image's illumination into dark, normal or shadow and then based on the illumination type; an appropriate technique is applied for illumination normalization. Propose system ensures that there is no loss of features from the image due to a proper selection of illumination normalization technique for illumination compensation. Moreover, it also saves the processing time for illumination normalization process when an image is classified as normal. This makes the approach computationally efficient. Rough Set Theory is used to build rmf illumination classifier for illumination classification. The results obtained as high as 96% in terms of accuracy of correct classification of images as dark, normal or shadow.     

Variable lighting face recognition using discrete wavelet transform

This paper presents a new discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based illumination normalization approach for face recognition under varying lighting conditions. Our method consists of three steps. Firstly, DWT-based denoising technique is employed to detect the illumination discontinuities in the detail subbands. And the detail coefficients are updated with using the obtained discontinuity information. Secondly, a smooth version of the input image is obtained by applying the inverse DWT on the updated wavelet coefficients. Finally, multi-scale reflectance model is presented to extract the illumination invariant features. The merit of the proposed method is it can preserve the illumination discontinuities when smoothing image. Thus it can reduce the halo artifacts in the normalized images. Moreover, only one parameter involved and the parameter selection process is simple and computationally fast. Experiments are carried out upon the Yale B and CMU PIE face databases, and the results demonstrate the proposed method can achieve satisfactory recognition rates under varying illumination conditions.     

Face recognition under arbitrary illumination using illuminated exemplars

Recently, the importance of face recognition has been increasingly emphasized since popular CCD cameras are distributed to various applications. However, facial images are dramatically changed by lighting variations, so that facial appearance changes caused serious performance degradation in face recognition. Many researchers have tried to overcome these illumination problems using diverse approaches, which have required a multiple registered images per person or the prior knowledge of lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a new method for face recognition under arbitrary lighting conditions, given only a single registered image and training data under unknown illuminations. Our proposed method is based on the illuminated exemplars which are synthesized from photometric stereo images of training data. The linear combination of illuminated exemplars can represent the new face and the weighted coefficients of those illuminated exemplars are used as identity signature. We make experiments for verifying our approach and compare it with two traditional approaches. As a result, higher recognition rates are reported in these experiments using the illumination subset of Max-Planck Institute face database and Korean face database.     

Face recognition across illumination

Illumination variation on images of faces is one of the most difficult problems in face recognition systems. The performance of a self-organizing map-based face recognition system is highly degraded when the illumination in test images differs from that of the training images. Illumination normalization is a way to solve this problem. Both global and local image enhancement methods are studied in this article. A local histogram equalization method strongly improves the recognition accuracy of the CMU-PIE face database. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007     

Robust face recognition using 2D and 3D data: Pose and illumination compensation

The paper addresses the problem of face recognition under varying pose and illumination. Robustness to appearance variations is achieved not only by using a combination of a 2D color and a 3D image of the face, but mainly by using face geometry information to cope with pose and illumination variations that inhibit the performance of 2D face recognition. A face normalization approach is proposed, which unlike state-of-the-art techniques is computationally efficient and does not require an extended training set. Experimental results on a large data set show that template-based face recognition performance is significantly benefited from the application of the proposed normalization algorithms prior to classification.     

Bimode model for face recognition and face representation

Tensorface based approaches decompose an image into its constituent factors (i.e., person, lighting, viewpoint, etc.), and then utilize these factor spaces for recognition. However, tensorface is not a preferable choice, because of the complexity of its multimode. In addition, a single mode space, except the person-space, could not be used for recognition directly. From the viewpoint of practical application, we propose a bimode model for face recognition and face representation. This new model can be treated as a simplified model representation of tensorface. However, their respective algorithms for training are completely different, due to their different definitions of subspaces. Thanks to its simpler model form, the proposed model requires less iteration times in the process of training and testing. Moreover bimode model can be further applied to an image reconstruction and image synthesis via an example image. Comprehensive experiments on three face image databases (PEAL, YaleB frontal and Weizmann) validate the effectiveness of the proposed new model.     

A method of illumination compensation for human face image based on quotient image

Illumination variation is one of the critical factors affecting face recognition rate. A novel approach for human face illumination compensation is presented in this paper. It constructs the nine-dimension face illumination subspace based on quotient image. In addition, with the aim to improve algorithm efficiency, a half-face illumination image is proposed and the low-dimension training set of the face image under different illumination conditions are obtained by means of PCA and wavelet transform. After processing, two different illumination compensation strategies are given: one is adding light, and the other is removing light. Based on the illumination compensation strategy, we implement the typical illumination sample image synthesis and the standard illumination sample image synthesis on a PCA feature subspace and a wavelet transform subspace, respectively, and the illumination compensation of the gray images and the color images are further realized. Experimental results based on the Yale Face Database B, the Extended Yale Face Database B and the CAS-PEAL Face Database indicate that execution time after compensation is approximately half the time and face recognition rate is improved by 20% compared with that of the original images.     

Face recognition based on 2D images under illumination and pose variations

We propose a novel 2D image-based approach that can simultaneously handle illumination and pose variations to enhance face recognition rate. It is much simpler, requires much less computational effort than the methods based on 3D models, and provides a comparable or better recognition rate.     

Local histogram specification for face recognition under varying lighting conditions

High frequency illumination and low frequency face features bring difficulties for most of the state-of-the-art face image preprocessors. In this paper, we propose two methods based on Local Histogram Specification (LHS) to preprocess face images under varying lighting conditions. The proposed methods are able to significantly remove both the low and high frequency parts of illumination on face images, as well as enhance face features lying in the low frequency part. Specifically, we first apply a high-pass filter on a face image to filter the low frequency illumination. Then, local histograms and local histogram statistics are learned from normal lighting images. In our first method, LHS is applied on the entire image. By contrast, in the second method, the regions contain high frequency illumination and weak face features on a face image are identified by local histogram statistics, before LHS is applied on these regions to eliminate high frequency illumination and enhance weak face features. Experimental results on the CMU PIE, Extended Yale B and CAS-PEAL-R1 databases demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.     

Shadow compensation in 2D images for face recognition

Illumination variation that occurs on face images degrades the performance of face recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to handling illumination variation for face recognition. Since most human faces are similar in shape, we can find the shadow characteristics, which the illumination variation makes on the faces depending on the direction of light. By using these characteristics, we can compensate for the illumination variation on face images. The proposed method is simple and requires much less computational effort than the other methods based on 3D models, and at the same time, provides a comparable recognition rate.     

Face recognition robust to left/right shadows; facial symmetry

This paper has proposed an efficient shaded-face pre-processing technique using front-face symmetry. The existing face recognition PCA technique has a shortcoming of making illumination variation lower the recognition performance of a shaded face. The study has aimed to improve the performance by using the symmetry of the left and right face.In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed face recognition method, the study experimented with the Yale face database with left/right shadows. The experimental methods for this are as following: the existing PCA, PCA with first three eigenfaces excluded, histogram equalization and the proposed method. As the result, it was shown that the proposed method has a rather excellent recognition performance (98.9%).     

Efficient 3D reconstruction for face recognition

Face recognition with variant pose, illumination and expression (PIE) is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an analysis-by-synthesis framework for face recognition with variant PIE. First, an efficient two-dimensional (2D)-to-three-dimensional (3D) integrated face reconstruction approach is introduced to reconstruct a personalized 3D face model from a single frontal face image with neutral expression and normal illumination. Then, realistic virtual faces with different PIE are synthesized based on the personalized 3D face to characterize the face subspace. Finally, face recognition is conducted based on these representative virtual faces. Compared with other related work, this framework has following advantages: (1) only one single frontal face is required for face recognition, which avoids the burdensome enrollment work; (2) the synthesized face samples provide the capability to conduct recognition under difficult conditions like complex PIE; and (3) compared with other 3D reconstruction approaches, our proposed 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is fully automatic and more efficient. The extensive experimental results show that the synthesized virtual faces significantly improve the accuracy of face recognition with changing PIE.     

Independent component analysis in a local facial residue space for face recognition

In this paper, we propose an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based face recognition algorithm, which is robust to illumination and pose variation. Generally, it is well known that the first few eigenfaces represent illumination variation rather than identity. Most Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based methods have overcome illumination variation by discarding the projection to a few leading eigenfaces. The space spanned after removing a few leading eigenfaces is called the “residual face space”. We found that ICA in the residual face space provides more efficient encoding in terms of redundancy reduction and robustness to pose variation as well as illumination variation, owing to its ability to represent non-Gaussian statistics. Moreover, a face image is separated into several facial components, local spaces, and each local space is represented by the ICA bases (independent components) of its corresponding residual space. The statistical models of face images in local spaces are relatively simple and facilitate classification by a linear encoding. Various experimental results show that the accuracy of face recognition is significantly improved by the proposed method under large illumination and pose variations.     

Extraction of illumination invariant facial features from a single image using nonsubsampled contourlet transform

Face recognition under varying lighting conditions is challenging, especially for single image based recognition system. Exacting illumination invariant features is an effective approach to solve this problem. However, existing methods are hard to extract both multi-scale and multi-directivity geometrical structures at the same time, which is important for capturing the intrinsic features of a face image. In this paper, we propose to utilize the logarithmic nonsubsampled contourlet transform (LNSCT) to estimate the reflectance component from a single face image and refer it as the illumination invariant feature for face recognition, where NSCT is a fully shift-invariant, multi-scale, and multi-direction transform. LNSCT can extract strong edges, weak edges, and noise from a face image using NSCT in the logarithm domain. We analyze that in the logarithm domain the low-pass subband of a face image and the low frequency part of strong edges can be regarded as the illumination effects, while the weak edges and the high frequency part of strong edges can be considered as the reflectance component. Moreover, even though a face image is polluted by noise (in particular the multiplicative noise), the reflectance component can still be well estimated and meanwhile the noise is removed. The LNSCT can be applied flexibly as neither assumption on lighting condition nor information about 3D shape is required. Experimental results show the promising performance of LNSCT for face recognition on Extended Yale B and CMU-PIE databases.     

Robust facial feature tracking under varying face pose and facial expression

This paper presents a hierarchical multi-state pose-dependent approach for facial feature detection and tracking under varying facial expression and face pose. For effective and efficient representation of feature points, a hybrid representation that integrates Gabor wavelets and gray-level profiles is proposed. To model the spatial relations among feature points, a hierarchical statistical face shape model is proposed to characterize both the global shape of human face and the local structural details of each facial component. Furthermore, multi-state local shape models are introduced to deal with shape variations of some facial components under different facial expressions. During detection and tracking, both facial component states and feature point positions, constrained by the hierarchical face shape model, are dynamically estimated using a switching hypothesized measurements (SHM) model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately and robustly tracks facial features in real time under different facial expressions and face poses.     

Local Centre of Mass Face for face recognition under varying illumination

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this work we propose a novel method to extract illumination insensitive features for face recognition called local centre of mass face (LCMF). In this LCMF...