Expression and illumination invariant preprocessing technique for Face Recognition

Face recognition is one of the most intensively studied topics in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. Facial expression, which changes face geometry, usually has an adverse effect on the performance of a face recognition system. Also, the appearance of a face image is usually affected by illumination conditions that hinder the automatic face recognition process. In this paper, we propose a robust expression and illumination invariant preprocessing technique for face recognition. We propose a new wavelet based method to eliminate the effect of expression variation and combine this method with an existing DCT based method for illumination normalization. Experimental results on the Yale database show that the proposed approach improves the face recognition rates.