Morphable Reflectance Fields for enhancing face recognition

In this paper, we present a novel framework to address the confounding effects of illumination variation in face recognition. By augmenting the gallery set with realistically relit images, we enhance recognition performance in a classifier-independent way. We describe a novel method for single-image relighting, Morphable Reflectance Fields (MoRF), which does not require manual intervention and provides relighting superior to that of existing automatic methods. We test our framework through face recognition experiments using various state-of-the-art classifiers and popular benchmark datasets: CMU PIE, Multi-PIE, and MERL Dome. We demonstrate that our MoRF relighting and gallery augmentation framework achieves improvements in terms of both rank-1 recognition rates and ROC curves. We also compare our model with other automatic relighting methods to confirm its advantage. Finally, we show that the recognition rates achieved using our framework exceed those of state-of-the-art recognizers on the aforementioned databases.