Maximizing intra-individual correlations for illumination-insensitive face recognition

Illumination variation has been one of the most intractable problems in face recognition and many approaches have been proposed to handle illumination problem in the last decades of years. The key problem is how to get stable similarity measurements between two face images of the same individual but captured under dramatically different lighting conditions. We propose a framework to optimize the illumination normalization for a pair of gallery and probe face images by maximizing a correlation (MAC) between them. The illumination normalization in the proposed framework tends to maximize the intra-individual correlations instead of both the inter- and intra-individual correlations. Experiments on Extended YaleB and CMU-PIE face databases show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in face recognition across varying lighting conditions.