Shadow compensation in 2D images for face recognition

Illumination variation that occurs on face images degrades the performance of face recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to handling illumination variation for face recognition. Since most human faces are similar in shape, we can find the shadow characteristics, which the illumination variation makes on the faces depending on the direction of light. By using these characteristics, we can compensate for the illumination variation on face images. The proposed method is simple and requires much less computational effort than the other methods based on 3D models, and at the same time, provides a comparable recognition rate.