Illumination-robust face recognition using retina modeling

Illumination variations that might occur on face images degrade the performance of face recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method of illumination normalization based on retina modeling by combining two adaptive nonlinear functions and a Difference of Gaussians filter. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the Yale B database and the Feret illumination database using two face recognition methods: PCA based and Local Binary Pattern based (LBP). Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves very high recognition rates even for the most challenging illumination conditions. Our algorithm has also a low computational complexity.