Illumination transfer using homomorphic wavelet filtering and its application to light-insensitive face recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel homomorphic wavelet filtering based illumination transfer technique to change the dominant lighting of one face image (source face image) to another face image (reference face image ). Specifically, in the proposed method, based on the ldquoreflectance-illuminationrdquo imaging model, we first obtain an approximate estimate of the illumination component of the face image through a wavelet-based Multiresolution Analysis (MRA) in the logarithm domain of the input image. Then, a homomorphic filtering procedure is applied to improve the accuracy of the illumination component estimation. Finally, the source face image is re-lighted by substituting the estimated illumination component of the reference image for that of the source image. The proposed method is entirely an image processing based method without any 3D geometry modeling steps, so it is simple but effective. The method is also applied easily to illumination invariant face recognition by transferring a standard illumination to all the face images. Experimental results show that our method is quite effective for both illumination transfer and illumination-insensitive face recognition.