Variable lighting face recognition using discrete wavelet transform

This paper presents a new discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based illumination normalization approach for face recognition under varying lighting conditions. Our method consists of three steps. Firstly, DWT-based denoising technique is employed to detect the illumination discontinuities in the detail subbands. And the detail coefficients are updated with using the obtained discontinuity information. Secondly, a smooth version of the input image is obtained by applying the inverse DWT on the updated wavelet coefficients. Finally, multi-scale reflectance model is presented to extract the illumination invariant features. The merit of the proposed method is it can preserve the illumination discontinuities when smoothing image. Thus it can reduce the halo artifacts in the normalized images. Moreover, only one parameter involved and the parameter selection process is simple and computationally fast. Experiments are carried out upon the Yale B and CMU PIE face databases, and the results demonstrate the proposed method can achieve satisfactory recognition rates under varying illumination conditions.

► We propose a new illumination normalization method for face recognition under varying lighting conditions.
► DWT-based denoising model is adopted for detecting the illumination discontinuities in the high-frequency subbands.
► Multi-scale reflectance model is presented for extracting illumination invariant facial features.
► The performance of our method on the famous face databases is analyzed.