Robust face recognition by an albedo based 3D morphable model

Large pose and illumination variations are very challenging for face recognition. The 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) approach is one of the effective methods for pose and illumination invariant face recognition. However, it is very difficult for the 3DMM to recover the illumination of the 2D input image because the ratio of the albedo and illumination contributions in a pixel intensity is ambiguous. Unlike the traditional idea of separating the albedo and illumination contributions using a 3DMM, we propose a novel Albedo Based 3D Morphable Model (AB3DMM), which removes the illumination component from the images using illumination normalisation in a preprocessing step. A comparative study of different illumination normalisation methods for this step is conducted on PIE and Multi-PIE databases. The results show that overall performance of our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.