Face Recognition Based on Image Enhancement and Gabor Features

Variations in lighting conditions, pose and expression make face recognition an even more challenging and difficult task. This paper presents a face recognition approach by using image enhancement and Gabor wavelets transformation. In face recognition, image preprocessing is the key step since it is important to features extract and recognition. Logarithm transformation and normalization are performed in face images captured under various lighting conditions for face recognition. This involves convolving a face image with a series of Gabor wavelets at different scales, locations, and orientations and extracting features from Gabor filtered images. Significant improvements are also observed when the preprocessing and Gabor filtered images are used for feature extraction instead of the original images. The approach achieves 94.4% recognition accuracy using only 160 features of a face image. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves face recognition performance using this scheme when training and testing on images captured under variable illumination and expression